LITERATURE AND LIFE 



fttnVus 



By W. D. HOWELLS 

AUTHOR OF 

LITERARY FRIENDS AND ACQUAINTANCE' 

"HEROINES OF FICTION" 

"MY LITERARY PASSIONS" ETC. 



ILL US TR A TED 




HARPER & BROTHERS PUBLISHERS 

NEW YORK AND LONDON 

1902 



THE LIBRARY OF 

CONGRESS, 
Two Cowee Recsiveo 

rCnPVRIOHT ENTRY 

vx, r~ fij o i~ 

CLASS O^KXd Mo. 
OOP V 



Copyright, 1902, by Harpbr & Brothers. 

Ail rights reserved. 

Published October, 1902. 



A WORD OF EXPLANATION 

PERHAPS the reader may not feel in these papers 
that inner solidarity which the writer is conscious 
of ; and it is in this doubt that the writer wishes to offer 
a word of explanation. He owns, as he must, that they 
have every appearance of a group of desultory sketches 
and essays, without palpable relation to one another, 
or superficial allegiance to any central motive. Yet 
he ventures to hope that the reader who makes his way 
through them will be aware, in the retrospect, of some- 
thing like this relation and this allegiance. 

For my own part, if I am to identify myself with the 
writer who is here on his defence, I have never been 
able to see much difference between what seemed to 
me Literature and what seemed to me Life. If I did 
not find life in what professed to be literature, I dis- 
abled its profession, and possibly from this habit, now 
inveterate with me, I am never quite sure of life unless 
I find literature in it. Unless the thing seen reveals 
to me an intrinsic poetry, and puts on phrases that 
clothe it pleasingly to the imagination, I do not much 
care for it ; but if it will do this, I do not mind how poor 
or common or squalid it shows at first glance : it chal- 
lenges my curiosity and keeps my sympathy. In- 
stantly I love it and wish to share my pleasure in it 
with some one else, or as many ones else as I can get 
to look or listen. If the thing is something read, rather 
than seen, I am not anxious about the matter: if it 

iii 



A WORD OF EXPLANATION 

is like life, I know that it is poetry, and take it to my 
heart. There can be no offence in it for which its truth 
will not make me amends. 

Out of this way of thinking and feeling about these 
two great things, about Literature and Life, there may 
have arisen a confusion as to which is which. But I 
do not wish to part them, and in their union I have 
found, since I learned my letters, a joy in them both 
which I hope will last till I forget my letters. 

"So was it when my life began; 
So is it, now I am a man; 
So be it when I shall grow old." 

It is the rainbow in the sky for me; and I have 
seldom seen a sky without some bit of rainbow in it. 
Sometimes I can make others see it, sometimes not; 
but I always like to try, and if I fail I harbor no worse 
thought of them than that they have not had their eyes 
examined and fitted with glasses which would at least 
have helped their vision 

W. D. H. 



CONTENTS 

PAGE 

The Man of Letters as a Man of Business . . i 

Worries of a Winter Walk 36 

Confessions of a Summer Colonist 45 

The Editor's Relations with the Young Con- 
tributor 63 

Summer Isles of Eden 78 

Wild Flowers of the Asphalt 89 

Last Days in a Dutch Hotel 95 

Some Anomalies of the Short Story . . . . no 

A Circus in the Suburbs 125 

A She Hamlet 132 

Spanish Prisoners of War 141 

The Midnight Platoon 154 

The Beach at Rockaway 161 

American Literary Centres 173 

Sawdust in the Arena 187 

At a Dime Museum 193 

American Literature in Exile 202 

The Horse Show 206 

The Problem of the Summer 216 

Esthetic New York Fifty-Odd Years Ago . . 222 

From New York into New England 228 

v 



CONTENTS 

PAGE 

The Standard Household-Effect Company . . 240 

Staccato Notes of a Vanished Summer .... 253 

The Art of the Adsmith 265 

The Psychology of Plagiarism 273 

Puritanism in American Fiction 278 

The What and the How in Art 284 

Politics of American Authors 290 

Storage 298 

" Floating Down the River on the O-hi-o" ... 309 



ILLUSTRATIONS 

" ON THE DOWN EAST COAST " Frontispiece 

" IT PROFESSED TO BE SUNNY, AND THERE 
WAS REALLY SOME SORT OF HARD GLIT- 
TER IN THE AIR " Facing p. 38 

" THE COTTAGES . . . ARE DROPPED AS 

NEAR THE OCEAN AS MAY BE " . . . " " 50 

" IN WHATEVER SORT OUR COLONISTS AMUSE 
THEMSELVES, IT IS WITH THE LEAST POS- 
SIBLE CEREMONY " " " 58 

" IN THE PRETTY PUBLIC GARDEN "... " " 80 

THE TORTOISE AND HIS FRIENDS .... " " 80 

PADRE GIACOMO ISSAVERDENS " " 84 

"... GROTESQUE WITH WIND-WORN AND 

WAVE-WORN ROCKS " " " 86 

A BERMUDA HOUSE " " 86 

"... SUCH SWAMPY EXPANSES AS THE 
CONVERGING SURFACE ROADS FORM AT 
DEAD MAN'S CURVE " " " 90 

" I CANNOT PROMISE THE VISITOR TO THE 
ROOF GARDEN THAT HE WILL FIND GOLD- 
EN-ROD THERE EVERY NIGHT " ... " « g^ 

ON THE DUNES AT SCHEVENINGEN .... " " 98 ' 

" PRETTY IS THE WORD FOR HER FACE " . . " " 106 

WAITING FOR THEIR TURN " " 128 

" YOU NEVER CEASED TO FEEL . . . THAT 
IT WAS A WOMAN WHO WAS DOING THAT 
MELANCHOLY DANE " " " 134 

vii 



ILLUSTRATIONS 

SPANISH PRISONERS OF WAR Facing p. 144 

AFTER DINNER " " 150 

" THEY STOOD SLOUCHED IN DIM AND SOLEMN 

PHALANX UNDER THE NIGHT SKY " . . " " 156 

ROCKAWAY BEACH " " 162 

"IT IS NOT PICTURESQUE, OR POETIC, OR 

DRAMATIC; IT IS QUEER" " " 170 

" ' I HOPE I'M NOT DISTURBING YOU ANY '" . " " 198 

" THE EFFECT IS THAT THEY ARE THERE 

TO BE SEEN" " " 208 

" WITH THE HORSES THEMSELVES I COULD 

FIND NO FAULT " " " 212 

" THE MOWING-LANDS ALONE ARE RICH " . " " 230 

" THE GREAT SQUARE HOUSES . . . PAINTED 

WHITE" " " 234 

AN ASPECT OF PORTSMOUTH FROM THE PIS- 

CATAQUA " " 238 

" THE WEATHER-BEATEN MANSION OF SIR 

WILLIAM PEPPERRELL " " " 254 

THE VILLAGE SMITHY, KITTERY POINT ... " " 256 

SIR WILLIAM PEPPERRELL " ** 260 

" THE HILLS . . . THAT CHANGE WITH THE 

STEAMER'S COURSE " " " 310 

" IN THE SPRING . . . THE RIVER SCALES 

ITS BANKS" " " 314 

" THE HOUSE - BOAT DWELLERS, WHOSE 

SLUGGISH CRAFT LAY MOORED AMONG 

THE WILLOWS "..... " " 318 

TOWS OF COAL BARGES 3 2 ° 

"... STOPPING TO PUT OFF OR TAKE ON 

MERCHANDISE OR MEN " " " 322 



LITERATURE AND LIFE 



LITERATURE AND LIFE 



THE MAN OF LETTERS AS A MAN OF BUSINESS 

1 THINK that every man ought to work for his 
living, without exception, and that, when he has 
once avouched his willingness to work, society should 
provide him with work and warrant him a living. I 
do not think any man ought to live by an art. A 
man's art should be his privilege, when he has proven 
his fitness to exercise it, and has otherwise earned 
his daily bread; and its results .should be free to all. 
There is an instinctive sense of this, even in the midst 
of the grotesque confusion of our economic being; 
people feel that there is something profane, something 
impious, in taking money for a picture, or a poem, or 
a statue. Most of all, the artist himself feels this. 
He puts on a bold front with the world, to be sure, and 
brazens it out as Business; but he knows very well 
that there is something false and vulgar in it; and 
that the work which cannot be truly priced in money 
cannot be truly paid in money. He can, of course, 
say that the priest takes money for reading the mar- 
riage service, for christening the new-born babe, and 
for saying the last office for the dead; that the physi- 
cian sells healing; that justice itself is paid for; and 
that he is merely a party to the thing that is and must 
be. He can say that, as the thing is, unless he sells his 

I 



LITERATURE AND LIFE 

art he cannot live, that society will leave him to starve 
if he does not hit its fancy in a picture, or a poem, or a 
statue ; and all this is bitterly true. He is, and he must 
be, only too glad if there is a market for his wares. 
Without a market for his wares he must perish, or turn 
to making something that will sell better than pictures, 
or poems, or statues. All the same, the sin and the 
shame remain, and the averted eye sees them still, with 
its inward vision. Many will make believe otherwise, 
but I would rather not make believe otherwise ; and in 
trying to write of Literature as Business I am tempted 
to begin by saying that Business is the opprobrium of 
Literature. 



Literature is at once the most intimate and the most 
articulate of the arts. It cannot impart its effect 
through the senses or the nerves as the other arts can ; 
it is beautiful only through the intelligence; it is the 
mind speaking to the mind; until it has been put into 
absolute terms, of an invariable significance, it does 
not exist at all. It cannot awaken this emotion in 
one, and that in another; if it fails to express precisely 
the meaning of the author, if it does not say him, it 
says nothing, and is nothing. So that when a poet 
has put his heart, much or little, into a poem, and sold 
it to a magazine, the scandal is greater than when a 
painter has sold a picture to a patron, or a sculptor 
has modelled a statue to order. These are artists less 
articulate and less intimate than the poet; they are 
more exterior to their work; they are less personally 
in it; they part with less of themselves in the dicker. 
It does not change the nature of the case to say that 
Tennyson and Longfellow and Emerson sold the poems 
in which they couched the most mystical messages 

2 



THE MAN OF LETTERS AS A MAN OF BUSINESS 

their genius was charged to bear mankind. They 
submitted to the conditions which none can escape; 
but that does not justify the conditions, which are 
none the less the conditions of hucksters because they 
are imposed upon poets. If it will serve to make my 
meaning a little clearer, we will suppose that a poet 
has been crossed in love, or has suffered some real 
sorrow, like the loss of a wife or child. He pours out 
his broken heart in verse that shall bring tears of sa- 
cred sympathy from his readers, and an editor pays 
him a hundred dollars for the right of bringing his 
verse to their notice. It is perfectly true that the poem 
was not written for these dollars, but it is perfectly 
true that it was sold for them. The poet must use his 
emotions to pay his provision bills; he has no other 
means ; society does not propose to pay his bills for him. 
Yet, and at the end of the ends, the unsophisticated wit- 
ness finds the transaction ridiculous, finds it repulsive, 
finds it shabby. Somehow he knows that if our huck- 
stering civilization did not at every moment violate the 
eternal fitness of things, the poet's song would have 
been given to the world, and the poet would have been 
cared for by the whole human brotherhood, as any man 
should be who does the duty that every man owes it. 

The instinctive sense of the dishonor which money- 
purchase does to art is so strong that sometimes a 
man of letters who can pay his way otherwise refuses 
pay for his work, as Lord Byron did, for a while, from 
a noble pride, and as Count Tolstoy has tried to do, 
from a noble conscience. But Byron's publisher 
profited by a generosity which did not reach his read- 
ers; and the Countess Tolstoy collects the copyright 
which her husband foregoes ; so that these two eminent 
instances of protest against business in literature may 
be said not to have shaken its money basis. I know 
of no others ; but there may be many that I am culpa- 

3 



LITERATURE AND LIFE 

bly ignorant of. Still, I doubt if there are enough to 
affect the fact that Literature is Business as well as 
Art, and almost as soon. At present business is the 
only human solidarity; we are all bound together 
with that chain, whatever interests and tastes and 
principles separate us, and I feel quite sure that in 
writing of the Man of Letters as a Man of Business I 
shall attract far more readers than I should in writing 
of him as an Artist. Besides, as an artist he has been 
done a great deal already ; and a commercial state like 
ours has really more concern in him as a business man. 
Perhaps it may sometime be different; I do not believe 
it will till the conditions are different, and that is a long 
way off. 

II 

In the mean time I confidently appeal to the read- 
er's imagination with the fact that there are several 
men of letters among us who are such good men of 
business that they can command a hundred dollars 
a thousand words for all they write. It is easy to 
write a thousand words a day, and, supposing one of 
these authors to work steadily, it can be seen that his 
net earnings during the year would come to some such 
sum as the President of the United States gets for do- 
ing far less work of a much more perishable sort. If the 
man of letters were wholly a business man, this is what 
would happen; he would make his forty or fifty thou- 
sand dollars a year, and be able to consort with bank 
presidents, and railroad officials, and rich tradesmen, 
and other flowers of our plutocracy on equal terms. 
But, unfortunately, from a business point of view, he 
is also an artist, and the very qualities that enable 
him to delight the public disable him from delighting 
it uninterruptedly. "No rose blooms right along," 

4 



THE MAN OF LETTERS AS A MAN OF BUSINESS 

as the English boys at Oxford made an American col- 
legian say in a theme which they imagined for him 
in his national parlance; and the man of letters, as 
an artist, is apt to have times and seasons when he 
cannot blossom. Very often it shall happen that his 
mind will lie fallow between novels or stories for weeks 
and months at a stretch; when the suggestions of the 
friendly editor shall fail to fruit in the essays or arti- 
cles desired; when the muse shall altogether withhold 
herself, or shall respond only in a feeble dribble of 
verse which he might sell indeed, but which it would 
not be good business for him to put on the market. 
But supposing him to be a very diligent and contin- 
uous worker, and so happy as to have fallen on a theme 
that delights him and bears him along, he may please 
himself so ill with the result of his labors that he can 
do nothing less in artistic conscience than destroy a 
day's work, a week's work, a month's work. I know 
one man of letters who wrote to-day and tore up to- 
morrow for nearly a whole summer. But even if part 
of the mistaken work may be saved, because it is good 
work out of place, and not intrinsically bad, the task 
of reconstruction wants almost as much time as the 
production; and then, when all seems done, comes 
the anxious and endless process of revision. These 
drawbacks reduce the earning capacity of what I may 
call the high-cost man of letters in such measure that 
an author whose name is known everywhere, and 
whose reputation is commensurate with the bound- 
aries of his country, if it does not transcend them, 
shall have the income, say, of a rising young phy- 
sician, known to a few people in a subordinate city. 

In view of this fact, so humiliating to an author in 
the presence of a nation of business men like ours, I 
do not know that I can establish the man of letters in 
the popular esteem as very much of a business man, 

5 



LITERATURE AND LIFE 

after all. He must still have a low rank among prac- 
tical people ; and he will be regarded by the great mass 
of Americans as perhaps a little off, a little funny, a 
little soft! Perhaps not; and yet I would rather not 
have a consensus of public opinion on the question; 
I think I am more comfortable without it. 



Ill 

There is this to be said in defence of men of letters 
on the business side, that literature is still an infant 
industry with us, and, so far from having been pro- 
tected by our laws, it was exposed for ninety years 
after the foundation of the republic to the vicious com- 
petition of stolen goods. It is true that we now have 
the international copyright law at last, and we can at 
least begin to forget our shame; but literary property 
has only forty-two years of life under our unjust stat- 
utes, and if it is attacked by robbers the law does not 
seek out the aggressors and punish them, as it would 
seek out and punish the trespassers upon any other 
kind of property; it leaves the aggrieved owner to 
bring suit against them, and recover damages, if 
he can. This may be right enough in itself; but I 
think, then, that all property should be defended by 
civil suit, and should become public after forty-two 
years of private tenure. The Constitution guaran- 
tees us all equality before the law, but the law-makers 
seem to have forgotten this in the case of our literary 
industry. So long as this remains the case, we can- 
not expect the best business talent to go into literature, 
and the man of letters must keep his present low grade 
among business men. 

As I have hinted, it is but a little while that he has 
had any standing at all. I may say that it is only since 

6 



THE MAN OF LETTERS AS A MAN OF BUSINESS 

the Civil War that literature has become a business 
with us. Before that time we had authors, and very 
good ones; it is astonishing how good they were; but 
I do not remember any of them who lived by litera- 
ture except Edgar A. Poe, perhaps; and we all know 
how he lived; it was largely upon loans. They were 
either men of fortune, or they were editors or profess- 
ors, with salaries or incomes apart from the small 
gains of their pens ; or they were helped out with pub- 
lic offices ; one need not go over their names or classify 
them. Some of them must have made money by their 
books, but I question whether any one could have 
lived, even very simply, upon the money his books 
brought him. No one could do that now, unless he 
wrote a book that we could not recognize as a work of 
literature. But many authors live now, and live pret- 
tily enough, by the sale of the serial publication of 
their writings to the magazines. They do not live 
so nicely as successful tradespeople, of course, or as 
men in the other professions when they begin to make 
themselves names; the high state of brokers, bankers, 
railroad operators, and the like is, in the nature of the 
case, beyond their fondest dreams of pecuniary af- 
fluence and social splendor. Perhaps they do not 
want the chief seats in the synagogue; it is certain 
they do not get them. Still, they do very fairly well, 
as things go; and several have incomes that would 
seem riches to the great mass of worthy Americans 
who work with their hands for a living — when they 
can get the work. Their incomes are mainly from se- 
rial publication in the different magazines; and the 
prosperity of the magazines has given a whole class 
existence which, as a class, was wholly unknown 
among us before the Civil War. It is not only the fa- 
mous or fully recognized authors who live in this way, 
but the much larger number of clever people who are 

7 



LITERATURE AND LIFE 

as yet known chiefly to the editors, and who may never 
make themselves a public, but who do well a kind of 
acceptable work. These are the sort who do not get 
reprinted from the periodicals; but the better recog- 
nized authors do get reprinted, and then their serial 
work in its completed form appeals to the readers who 
say they do not read serials. The multitude of these 
is not great, and if an author rested his hopes upon 
their favor he would be a much more imbittered man 
than he now generally is. But he understands perfectly 
well that his reward is in the serial and not in the book ; 
the return from that he may count as so much money 
found in the road— a few hundreds, a very few thou- 
sands, at the most, unless he is the author of an his- 
torical romance. 

IV 

I doubt, indeed, whether the earnings of literary 
men are absolutely as great as they were earlier in the 
century, in any of the English-speaking countries; 
relatively they are nothing like as great. Scott had 
forty thousand dollars for Woodstock, which was not 
a very large novel, and was by no means one of his 
best; and forty thousand dollars then had at least the 
purchasing power of sixty thousand now. Moore had 
three thousand guineas for Lalla Rookh, but what 
publisher would be rash enough to pay fifteen thou- 
sand dollars for the masterpiece of a minor poet now? 
The book, except in very rare instances, makes noth- 
ing like the return to the author that the magazine 
makes, and there are few leading authors who find 
their account in that form of publication. Those who 
do, those who sell the most widely in book form, 
are often not at all desired by editors; with difficulty 
they get a serial accepted by any principal maga- 

8 



THE MAN OF LETTERS AS A MAN OF BUSINESS 

zine. On the other hand, there are authors whose 
books, compared with those of the popular favorites, 
do not sell, and yet they are eagerly sought for by 
editors; they are paid the highest prices, and nothing 
that they offer is refused. These are literary artists; 
and it ought to be plain from what I am saying that 
in belles-lettres, at least, most of the best literature 
now first sees the light in the magazines, and most 
of the second-best appears first in book form. The 
old-fashioned people who flatter themselves upon their 
distinction in not reading magazine fiction or maga- 
zine poetry make a great mistake, and simply class 
themselves with the public whose taste is so crude that 
they cannot enjoy the best. Of course, this is true 
mainly, if not merely, of belles-lettres ; history, science, 
politics, metaphysics, in spite of the many excellent 
articles and papers in these sorts upon what used to 
be called various emergent occasions, are still to be 
found at their best in books. The most monumental 
example of literature, at once light and good, which 
has first reached the public in book form is in the dif- 
ferent publications of Mark Twain; but Mr. Clemens 
has of late turned to the magazines too, and now takes 
their mint-mark before he passes into general circu- 
lation. All this may change again, but at present 
the magazines — we have no longer any reviews — 
form the most direct approach to that part of our read- 
ing public which likes the highest things in literary 
art. Their readers, if we may judge from the quality 
of the literature they get, are more refined than the 
book readers in our community; and their taste has 
no doubt been cultivated by that of the disciplined 
and experienced editors. So far as I have known 
these, they are men of aesthetic conscience and of gen- 
erous sympathy. They have their preferences in 
the different kinds, and they have their theory of what 

9 



LITERATURE AND LIFE 

kind will be most acceptable to their readers; but they 
exercise their selective function with the wish to give 
them the best things they can. I do not know one of 
them — and it has been my good fortune to know 
them nearly all — who would print a wholly inferior 
thing for the sake of an inferior class of readers, 
though they may sometimes decline a good thing 
because for one reason or another they believe it 
would not be liked. Still, even this does not often 
happen ; they would rather chance the good thing they 
doubted of than underrate their readers' judgment. 

The young author who wins recognition in a first- 
class magazine has achieved a double success, first, 
with the editor, and then with the best reading pub- 
lic. Many factitious and fallacious literary reputa- 
tions have been made through books, but very few 
have been made through the magazines, which are 
not only the best means of living, but of outlivipg, 
with the author ; they are both bread and fame to him. 
If I insist a little upon the high office which this mod- 
ern form of publication fulfils in the literary world, it 
is because I am impatient of the antiquated and igno- 
rant prejudice which classes the magazines as ephem- 
eral. They are ephemeral in form, but in substance 
they are not ephemeral, and what is best in them 
awaits its resurrection in the book, which, as the 
first form, is so often a lasting death. An interest- 
ing proof of the value of the magazine to literature 
is the fact that a good novel will often have wider 
acceptance as a book from having been a magazine 
serial. 



Under the regime of the great literary periodicals 
the prosperity of literary men would be much greater 

10 



THE MAN OF LETTERS AS A MAN OF BUSINESS 

than it actually is if the magazines were altogether 
literary. But they are not, and this is one reason 
why literature is still the hungriest of the professions. 
Two-thirds of the magazines are made up of material 
which, however excellent, is without literary quality. 
Very probably this is because even the highest class of 
readers, who are the magazine readers, have small love 
of pure literature, which seems to have been growing 
less and less in all classes. I say seems, because there 
are really no means of ascertaining the fact, and it 
may be that the editors are mistaken in making their 
periodicals two-thirds popular science, politics, econom- 
ics, and the timely topics which I will call contem- 
poranics. But, however that may be, their efforts in 
this direction have narrowed the field of literary in- 
dustry, and darkened the hope of literary prosperity 
kindled by the unexampled prosperity of their period- 
icals. They pay very well indeed for literature; they 
pay from five or six dollars a thousand words for the 
work of the unknown writer to a hundred and fifty 
dollars a thousand words for that of the most famous, 
or the most popular, if there is a difference between 
fame and popularity; but they do not, altogether, 
want enough literature to justify the best business 
talent in devoting itself to belles-lettres, to fiction, or 
poetry, or humorous sketches of travel, or light es- 
says; business talent can do far better in dry goods, 
groceries, drugs, stocks, real estate, railroads, and 
the like. I do not think there is any danger of a ruin- 
ous competition from it in the field which, though 
narrow, seems so rich to us poor fellows, whose busi- 
ness talent is small, at the best. 

The most of the material contributed to the maga- 
zines is the subject of agreement between the editor 
and the author; it is either suggested by the author 
or is the fruit of some suggestion from the editor; in 

II 



LITERATURE AND LIFE 

any case the price is stipulated beforehand, and it is 
no longer the custom for a well-known contributor 
to leave the payment to the justice or the generosity 
of the publisher; that was never a fair thing to either, 
nor ever a wise thing. Usually, the price is so much 
a thousand words, a truly odious method of computing 
literary value, and one well calculated to make the 
author feel keenly the hatefulness of selling his art 
at all. It is as if a painter sold his picture at so much 
a square inch, or a sculptor bargained away a group 
of statuary by the pound. But it is a custom that you 
cannot always successfully quarrel with, and most 
writers gladly consent to it, if only the price a thousand 
words is large enough. The sale to the editor means 
the sale of the serial rights only, but if the publisher 
of the magazine is also a publisher of books, the re- 
publication of the material is supposed to be his right, 
unless there is an understanding to the contrary; the 
terms for this are another affair. Formerly some- 
thing more could be got for the author by the simul- 
taneous appearance of his work in an English maga- 
zine; but now the great American magazines, which 
pay far higher prices than any others in the world, 
have a circulation in England so much exceeding 
that of any English periodical that the simultane- 
ous publication can no longer be arranged for from 
this side, though I believe it is still done here from the 
other side. 

VI 

I think this is the case of authorship as it now stands 
with regard to the magazines. I am not sure that the 
case is in every way improved for young authors. The 
magazines all maintain a staff for the careful exami- 
nation of manuscripts, but as most of the material 

12 



THE MAN OF LETTERS AS A MAN OF BUSINESS 

they print has been engaged, the number of volunteer 
contributions that they can use is very small; one of 
the greatest of them, I know, does not use fifty in the 
course of a year. The new writer, then, must be very 
good to be accepted, and when accepted he may wait 
long before he is printed. The pressure is so great in 
these avenues to the public favor that one, two, three 
years, are no uncommon periods of delay. If the young 
writer has not the patience for this, or has a soul above 
cooling his heels in the courts of fame, or must do his 
best to earn something at once, the book is his im- 
mediate hope. How slight a hope the book is I have 
tried to hint already, but if a book is vulgar enough 
in sentiment, and crude enough in taste, and flashy 
enough in incident, or, better or worse still, if it is a 
bit hot in the mouth, and promises impropriety if not 
indecency, there is a very fair chance of its success; 
I do not mean success with a self-respecting publisher, 
but with the public, which does not personally put its 
name to it, and is not openly smirched by it. I will 
not talk of that kind of book, however, but of the book 
which the young author has written out of an un- 
spoiled heart and an untainted mind, such as most 
young men and women write; and I will suppose that 
it has found a publisher. It is human nature, as com- 
petition has deformed human nature, for the pub- 
lisher to wish the author to take all the risks, and he 
possibly proposes that the author shall publish it at 
his own expense, and let him have a percentage of the 
retail price for managing it. If not that, he proposes 
that the author shall pay for the stereotype plates, 
and take fifteen per cent, of the price of the book; or 
if this will not go, if the author cannot, rather than 
will not, do it (he is commonly only too glad to do any- 
thing he can), then the publisher offers him ten per 
cent, of the retail price after the first thousand copies 

13 



LITERATURE AND LIFE 

have been sold. But if he fully believes in the book, 
he will give ten per cent, from the first copy sold, and 
pay all the costs of publication himself. The book 
is to be retailed for a dollar and a half, and the pub- 
lisher is not displeased with a new book that sells fif- 
teen hundred copies. Whether the author has as 
much reason to be pleased is a question, but if the book 
does not sell more he has only himself to blame, and 
had better pocket in silence the two hundred and twenty- 
five dollars he gets for it, and bless his publisher, 
and try to find work somewhere at five dollars a week. 
The publisher has not made any more, if quite as much 
as the author, and until a book has sold two thousand 
copies the division is fair enough. After that, the 
heavier expenses of manufacturing have been de- 
frayed and the book goes on advertising itself; there 
is merely the cost of paper, printing, binding, and 
marketing to be met, and the arrangement becomes 
fairer and fairer for the publisher. The author has 
no right to complain of this, in the case of his first 
book, which he is only too grateful to get accepted at 
all. If it succeeds, he has himself to blame for making 
the same arrangement for his second or third ; it is his 
fault, or else it is his necessity, which is practically 
the same thing. It will be business for the publisher 
to take advantage of his necessity quite the same as 
if it were his fault ; but I do not say that he will always 
do so; I believe he will very often not do so. 

At one time there seemed a probability of the en- 
largement of the author's gains by subscription pub- 
lication, and one very well-known American author 
prospered fabulously in that way. The percentage 
offered by the subscription houses was only about 
half as much as that paid by the trade, but the sales 
were so much greater that the author could very well 
afford to take it. Where the book-dealer sold ten, the 

14 



THE MAN OF LETTERS AS A MAN OF BUSINESS 

book-agent sold a hundred ; or at least he did so in the 
case of Mark Twain's books; and we all thought it 
reasonable he could do so with ours. Such of us as 
made experiment of him, however, found the facts 
illogical. No book of literary quality was made to 
go by subscription except Mr. Clemens's books, and 
I think these went because the subscription public 
never knew what good literature they were. This sort 
of readers, or buyers, were so used to getting some- 
thing worthless for their money that they would not 
spend it for artistic fiction, or, indeed, for any fiction 
at all except Mr. Clemens 's, which they probably sup- 
posed bad. Some good books of travel had a measur- 
able success through the book-agents, but not at all the 
success that had been hoped for ; and I believe now the 
subscription trade again publishes only compilations, 
or such works as owe more to the skill of the editor 
than the art of the writer. Mr. Clemens himself no 
longer offers his books to the public in that way. 

It is not common, I think, in this country, to pub- 
lish on the half-profits system, but it is very common 
in England, where, owing probably to the moisture 
in the air, which lends a fairy outline to every pros- 
pect, it seems to be peculiarly alluring. One of my 
own early books was published there on these terms, 
which I accepted with the insensate joy of the young 
author in getting any terms from a publisher. The 
book sold, sold every copy of the small first edition, 
and in due time the publisher's statement came. I did 
not think my half of the profits was very great, but it 
seemed a fair division after every imaginable cost had 
been charged up against my poor book, and that frail 
venture had been made to pay the expenses of com- 
position, corrections, paper, printing, binding, adver- 
tising, and editorial copies. The wonder ought to 
have been that there was anything at all coming to 

15 



LITERATURE AND LIFE 

me, but I was young and greedy then, and I really 
thought there ought to have been more. I was dis- 
appointed, but I made the best of it, of course, and 
took the account to the junior partner of the house 
which employed me, and said that I should like to 
draw on him for the sum due me from the London 
publishers. He said, Certainly; but after a glance 
at the account he smiled and said he supposed I knew 
how much the sum was? I answered, Yes; it was 
eleven pounds nine shillings, was not it? But I owned 
at the same time that I never was good at figures, and 
that I found English money peculiarly baffling. He 
laughed now, and said, It was eleven shillings and 
ninepence. In fact, after all those charges for com- 
position, corrections, paper, printing, binding, adver- 
tising, and editorial copies, there was a most ingen- 
ious and wholly surprising charge of ten per cent, 
commission on sales, which reduced my half from 
pounds to shillings, and handsomely increased the 
publisher's half in proportion. I do not now dispute 
the justice of the charge. It was not the fault of the 
half-profits system ; it was the fault of the glad young 
author who did not distinctly inform himself of its 
mysterious nature in agreeing to it, and had only 
to reproach himself if he was finally disappointed. 

But there is always something disappointing in 
the accounts of publishers, which I fancy is because 
authors are strangely constituted, rather than be- 
cause publishers are so. I will confess that I have 
such inordinate expectations of the sale of my books, 
which I hope I think modestly of, that the sales re- 
ported to me never seem great enough. The copy- 
right due me, no matter how handsome it is, appears 
deplorably mean, and I feel impoverished for several 
days after I get it. But, then, I ought to add that my 
balance in the bank is always much less than I have 

16 



THE MAN OF LETTERS AS A MAN OF BUSINESS 

supposed it to be, and my own checks, when they come 
back to me, have the air of having been in a conspir- 
acy to betray me. 

No, we literary men must learn, no matter how we 
boast ourselves in business, that the distress we feel 
from our publisher's accounts is simply idiopathic; 
and I for one wish to bear my witness to the constant 
good faith and uprightness of publishers. It is sup- 
posed that because they have the affair altogether 
in their hands they are apt to take advantage in it; 
but this does not follow, and as a matter of fact they 
have the affair no more in their own hands than any 
other business man you have an open account with. 
There is nothing to prevent you from looking at their 
books, except your own innermost belief and fear 
that their books are correct, and that your litera- 
ture has brought you so little because it has sold so 
little. 

The author is not to blame for his superficial de- 
lusion to the contrary, especially if he has written a 
book that has set every one talking, because it is of a 
vital interest. It may be of a vital interest, without 
being at all the kind of book people want to buy; it 
may be the kind of book that they are content to 
know at second hand ; there are such fatal books ; 
but hearing so much, and reading so much about it, 
the author cannot help hoping that it has sold much 
more than the publisher says. The publisher is un- 
doubtedly honest, however, and the author had bet- 
ter put away the comforting question of his integ- 
rity. 

The English writers seem largely to suspect their 
publishers ; but I believe that American authors, when 
not flown with flattering reviews, as largely trust 
theirs. Of course there are rogues in every walk of 
life. I will not say that I ever personally met them 

17 



LITERATURE AND LIFE 

in the flowery paths of literature, but I have heard of 
other people meeting them there, just as I have heard 
of people seeing ghosts, and I have to believe in both 
the rogues and the ghosts, without the witness of my 
own senses. I suppose, upon such grounds mainly, 
that there are wicked publishers, but, in the case of 
our books that do not sell, 1 am afraid that it is the 
graceless and inappreciative public which is far more 
to blame than the wickedest of the publishers. It is 
true that publishers will drive a hard bargain when 
they can, or when they must; but there is nothing to 
hinder an author from driving a hard bargain, too, 
when he can, or when he must; and it is to be said of 
the publisher that he is always more willing to abide 
by the bargain when it is made than the author is; 
perhaps because he has the best of it. But he has 
not always the best of it; I have known publishers 
too generous to take advantage of the innocence of 
authors; and I fancy that if publishers had to do with 
any race less diffident than authors, they would have 
won a repute for unselfishness that they do not now 
enjoy. It is certain that in the long period when we 
flew the black flag of piracy there were many among 
our corsairs on the high seas of literature who paid 
a fair price for the stranger craft they seized; still 
oftener they removed the cargo and released their 
capture with several weeks' provision; and although 
there was undoubtedly a good deal of actual throat- 
cutting and scuttling, still I feel sure that there was 
less of it than there would have been in any other line 
of business released to the unrestricted plunder of the 
neighbor. There was for a long time even a comity 
among these amiable buccaneers, who agreed not to 
interfere with each other, and so were enabled to pay 
over to their victims some portion of the profit from 
their stol ^n goods. Of all business men publishers 

18 



THE MAN OF LETTERS AS A MAN OF BUSINESS 

are probably the most faithful and honorable, and 
are only surpassed in virtue when men of letters turn 
business men. 



VII 

Publishers have their little theories, their little super- 
stitions, and their blind faith in the great god Chance 
which we all worship. These things lead them into 
temptation and adversity, but they seem to do fairly 
well as business men, even in their own behalf. They 
do not make above the usual ninety-five per cent, of 
failures, and more publishers than authors get rich. 

Some theories or superstitions publishers and au- 
thors share together. One of these is that it is best 
to keep your books all in the hands of one publisher 
if you can, because then he can give them more atten- 
tion and sell more of them. But my own experience 
is that when my books were in the hands of three pub- 
lishers they sold quite as well as when one had them; 
and a fellow -author whom I approached in question 
of this venerable belief laughed at it. This bold 
heretic held that it was best to give each new book to 
a new publisher, for then the fresh man put all his 
energies into pushing it; but if you had them all to- 
gether, the publisher rested in a vain security that 
one book would sell another, and that the fresh vent- 
ure would revive the public interest in the stale ones. 
I never knew this to happen, and I must class it with 
the superstitions of the trade. It may be so in other 
and more constant countries, but in our fickle repub- 
lic each last book has to fight its own way to public 
favor, much as if it had no sort of literary lineage. 
Of course this is stating it rather largely, and the truth 
will be found inside rather than outside of my state- 
ment; but there is at least truth enough in it to give 

19 



LITERATURE AND LIFE 

the young author pause. While one is preparing to 
sell his basket of glass, he may as well ask himself 
whether it is better to part with all to one dealer or 
not; and if he kicks it over, in spurning the imaginary 
customer who asks the favor of taking the entire stock, 
that will be his fault, and not the fault of the customer. 
However, the most important question of all with 
the man of letters as a man of business is what kind 
of book will sell the best of itself, because, at the end 
of the ends, a book sells itself or does not sell at all; 
kissing, after long ages of reasoning and a great deal 
of culture, still goes by favor, and though innumer- 
able generations of horses have been led to the water, 
not one horse has yet been made to drink. With the 
best, or the worst, will in the world, no publisher can 
force a book into acceptance. Advertising will not 
avail, and reviewing is notoriously futile. If the book 
does not strike the popular fancy, or deal with some 
universal interest, which need by no means be a pro- 
found or important one, the drums and the cymbals 
shall be beaten in vain. The book may be one of the 
best and wisest books in the world, but if it has not 
this sort of appeal in it the readers of it, and, worse 
yet, the purchasers, will remain few, though fit. The 
secret of this, like most other secrets of a rather ridicu- 
lous world, is in the awful keeping of fate, and we can 
only hope to surprise it by some lucky chance. To 
plan a surprise of it, to aim a book at the public favor, 
is the most hopeless of all endeavors, as it is one of the 
un worthiest; and I can, neither as a man of letters 
nor as a man of business, counsel the young author 
to do it. The best that you can do is to write the book 
that it gives you the most pleasure to write, to put as 
much heart and soul as you have about you into it, 
and then hope as hard as you can to reach the heart 
and soul of the great multitude of your fellow-men. 

20 



THE MAN OF LETTERS AS A MAN OF BUSINESS 

That, and that alone, is good business for a man of 
letters. 

The man of letters must make up his mind that in 
the United States the fate of a book is in the hands of 
the women. It is the women with us who have the 
most leisure, and they read the most books. They 
are far better educated, for the most part, than our 
men, and their tastes, if not their minds, are more 
cultivated. Our men read the newspapers, but our 
women read the books; the more refined among them 
read the magazines. If they do not always know 
what is good, they do know what pleases them, and 
it is useless to quarrel with their decisions, for there 
is no appeal from them. To go from them to the men 
would be going from a higher to a lower court, which 
would be honestly surprised and bewildered, if the 
thing were possible. As I say, the author of light 
literature, and often the author of solid literature, 
must resign himself to obscurity unless the ladies 
choose to recognize him. Yet it would be impossible 
to forecast their favor for this kind or that. Who 
could prophesy it for another, who guess it for himself ? 
We must strive blindly for it, and hope somehow that 
our best will also be our prettiest ; but we must remem- 
ber at the same time that it is not the ladies' man who 
is the favorite of the ladies. 

There are, of course, a few, a very few, of our great- 
est authors who have striven forward to the first place 
in our Valhalla without the help of the largest read- 
ing-class among us; but I should say that these were 
chiefly the humorists, for whom women are said no- 
where to have any warm liking, and who have gen- 
erally with us come up through the newspapers, and 
have never lost the favor of the newspaper readers. 
They have become literary men, as it were, without 
the newspaper readers' knowing it; but those who 

21 



LITERATURE AND LIFE 

have approached literature from another direction 
have won fame in it chiefly by grace of the women, 
who first read them, and then made their husbands 
and fathers read them. Perhaps, then, and as a mat- 
ter of business, it would be well for a serious author, 
when he finds that he is not pleasing the women, and 
probably never will please them, to turn humorous 
author, and aim at the countenance of the men. Ex- 
cept as a humorist he certainly never will get it, for 
your American, when he is not making money, or try- 
ing to do it, is making a joke, or trying to do it. 



VIII 

I hope that I have not been hinting that the author 
who approaches literature through journalism is not 
as fine and high a literary man as the author who 
comes directly to it, or through some other avenue; 
I have not the least notion of condemning myself by 
any such judgment. But I think it is pretty certain 
that fewer and fewer authors are turning from jour- 
nalism to literature, though the entente cordiale be- 
tween the two professions seems as great as ever. I 
fancy, though I may be as mistaken in this as I am 
in a good many other things, that most journalists 
would have been literary men if they could, at the be- 
ginning, and that the kindness they almost always 
show to young authors is an effect of the self-pity they 
feel for their own thwarted wish to be authors. When 
an author is once warm in the saddle, and is riding 
his winged horse to glory, the case is different: they 
have then often no sentiment about him ; he is no longer 
the image of their own young aspiration, and they 
would willingly see Pegasus buck under him, or have 
him otherwise brought to grief and shame. They 

22 



THE MAN OF LETTERS AS A MAN OF BUSINESS 

are apt to gird at him for his unhallowed gains, and 
they would be quite right in this if they proposed any 
way for him to live without them ; as I have allowed 
at the outset, the gains are unhallowed. Apparently 
it is unseemly for two or three authors to be making 
half as much by their pens as popular ministers often 
receive in salary ; the public is used to the pecuniary 
prosperity of some of the clergy, and at least sees noth- 
ing droll in it; but the paragrapher can always get a 
smile out of his readers at the gross disparity between 
the ten thousand dollars Jones gets for his novel and 
the five pounds Milton got for his epic. I have al- 
ways thought Milton was paid too little, but I will 
own that he ought not to have been paid at all, if it 
comes to that. Again I say that no man ought to 
live by any art; it is a shame to the art if not to the 
artist; but as yet there is no means of the artist's liv- 
ing otherwise and continuing an artist. 

The literary man has certainly no complaint to 
make of the newspaper man, generally speaking. I 
have often thought with amazement of the kindness 
shown by the press to our whole unworthy craft, and 
of the help so lavishly and freely given to rising and 
even risen authors. To put it coarsely, brutally, I 
do not suppose that any other business receives so 
much gratuitous advertising, except the theatre. It 
is enormous, the space given in the newspapers to 
literary notes, literary announcements, reviews, inter- 
views, personal paragraphs, biographies, and all the 
rest, not to mention the vigorous and incisive attacks 
made from time to time upon different authors for 
their opinions of romanticism, realism, capitalism, 
socialism, Catholicism, and Sandemanianism. I have 
sometimes doubted whether the public cared for so 
much of it all as the editors gave them, but I have al- 
ways said this under my breath, and I have thankfully 

23 



LITERATURE AND LIFE 

taken my share of the common bounty. A curious 
fact, however, is that this vast newspaper publicity 
seems to have very little to do with an author's popu- 
larity, though ever so much with his notoriety. Some 
of those strange subterranean fellows who never come 
to the surface in the newspapers, except for a con- 
temptuous paragraph at long intervals, outsell the 
famousest of the celebrities, and secretly have their 
horses and yachts and country seats, while immodest 
merit is left to get about on foot and look up summer 
board at the cheaper hotels. That is probably right, 
or it would not happen; it seems to be in the general 
scheme, like millionairism and pauperism; but it be- 
comes a question, then, whether the newspapers, with 
all their friendship for literature, and their actual 
generosity to literary men, can really help one much 
to fortune, however much they help one to fame. Such 
a question is almost too dreadful, and, though I have 
asked it, I will not attempt to answer it. I would 
much rather consider the question whether, if the 
newspapers can make an author, they can also un- 
make him, and I feel pretty safe in saying that I do not 
think they can. The Afreet, once out of the bottle, can 
never be coaxed back or cudgelled back; and the au- 
thor whom the newspapers have made cannot be un- 
made by the newspapers. Perhaps he could if they 
would let him alone; but the art of letting alone the 
creature of your favor, when he has forfeited your 
favor, is yet in its infancy with the newspapers. They 
consign him to oblivion with a rumor that fills the 
land, and they keep visiting him there with an up- 
roar which attracts more and more notice to him. An 
author who has long enjoyed their favor suddenly 
and rather mysteriously loses it, through his opin- 
ions on certain matters of literary taste, say. For 
the space of five or six years he is denounced with a 

24 



THE MAN OF LETTERS AS A MAN OF BUSINESS 

unanimity and an incisive vigor that ought to con- 
vince him there is something wrong. If he thinks 
it is his censors, he clings to his opinions with an 
abiding constancy, while ridicule, obloquy, carica- 
ture, burlesque, critical refutation, and personal detrac- 
tion follow unsparingly upon every expression, for 
instance, of his belief that romantic fiction is the 
highest form of fiction, and that the base, sordid, 
photographic, commonplace school of Tolstoy, Tour- 
guenief, Zola, Hardy, and James is unworthy a mo- 
ment's comparison with the school of Rider Haggard. 
All this ought certainly to unmake the author in ques- 
tion, but this is not really the effect. Slowly but sure- 
ly the clamor dies away, and the author, without re- 
linquishing one of his wicked opinions, or in any wise 
showing himself repentant, remains apparently whole; 
and he even returns in a measure to the old kindness — 
not indeed to the earlier day of perfectly smooth things, 
but certainly to as much of it as he merits. 

I would not have the young author, from this im- 
aginary case, believe that it is well either to court or 
to defy the good opinion of the press. In fact, it will 
not only be better taste, but it will be better business, 
for him to keep it altogether out of his mind. There 
is only one whom he can safely try to please, and that 
is himself. If he does this he will very probably please 
other people; but if he does not please himself he may 
be sure that he will not please them; the book which 
he has not enjoyed writing no one will enjoy reading. 
Still, I would not have him attach too little conse- 
quence to the influence of the press. I should say, 
let him take the celebrity it gives him gratefully but 
not too seriously; let him reflect that he is often the 
necessity rather than the ideal of the paragrapher, 
and that the notoriety the journalists bestow upon 
him is not the measure of their acquaintance with his 

25 



LITERATURE AND LIFE 

work, far less his meaning. They are good fellows, 
those hard-pushed, poor fellows of the press, but the 
very conditions of their censure, friendly or unfriend- 
ly, forbid it thoroughness, and it must often have 
more zeal than knowledge in it. 



IX 

There are some sorts of light literature once greatly 
in demand, but now apparently no longer desired by 
magazine editors, who ought to know what their read- 
ers desire. Among these is the travel sketch, to me 
a very agreeable kind, and really to be regretted in its 
decline. There are some reasons for its decline be- 
sides a change of taste in readers, and a possible sur- 
feit. Travel itself has become so universal that every- 
body, in a manner, has been everywhere, and the 
foreign scene has no longer the charm of strangeness. 
We do not think the Old World either so romantic or 
so ridiculous as we used; and perhaps from an in- 
stinctive perception of this altered mood writers no 
longer appeal to our sentiment or our humor with 
sketches of outlandish people and places. Of course, 
this can hold true only in a general way; the thing 
is still done, but not nearly so much done as formerly. 
When one thinks of the long line of American writers 
who have greatly pleased in this sort, and who even 
got their first fame in it, one must grieve to see it obso- 
lescent. Irving, Curtis, Bayard Taylor, Herman 
Melville, Ross Browne, Warner, Ik Marvell, Long- 
fellow, Lowell, Story, Mr. James, Mr. Aldrich, Mr. 
Hay, Mrs. Hunt, Mr. C. W. Stoddard, Mark Twain, 
and many others whose names will not come to me 
at the moment, have in their several ways richly con- 
tributed to our pleasure in it; but I cannot now fancy 

26 



THE MAN OF LETTERS AS A MAN OF BUSINESS 

a young author finding favor with an editor in a sketch 
of travel or a study of foreign manners and customs; 
his work would have to be of the most signal impor- 
tance and brilliancy to overcome the editor's feeling 
that the thing had been done already; and 1 believe 
that a publisher, if offered a book of such things, would 
look at it askance and plead the well-known quiet of 
the trade. Still, I may be mistaken. 

1 am rather more confident about the decline of an- 
other literary species — namely, the light essay. We 
have essays enough and to spare of certain soberer 
and severer sorts, such as grapple with problems and 
deal with conditions; but the kind that I mean, the 
slightly humorous, gentle, refined, and humane kind, 
seems no longer to abound as it once did. I do not 
know whether the editor discourages them, knowing 
his readers' frame, or whether they do not offer them- 
selves, but I seldom find them in the magazines. I 
certainly do not believe that if any one were now to 
write essays such as Warner's Backlog Studies, an 
editor would refuse them; and perhaps nobody really 
writes them. Nobody seems to write the sort that 
Colonel Higginson formerly contributed to the peri- 
odicals, or such as Emerson wrote. Without a great 
name behind it, I am afraid that a volume of essays 
would find few buyers, even after the essays had 
made a public in the magazines. There are, of course, 
instances to the contrary, but they are not so many or 
so striking as to make me think that the essay could 
be offered as a good opening for business talent. 

I suspect that good poetry by well-known hands 
was never better paid in the magazines than it is now. 
I must say, too, that I think the quality of the minor 
poetry of our day is better than that of twenty-five or 
thirty years ago. I could name half a score of young 
poets whose work from time to time gives me great 

27 



LITERATURE AND LIFE 

pleasure, by the reality of its feeling and the delicate 
perfection of its art, but I will not name them, for fear 
of passing over half a score of others equally mer- 
itorious. We have certainly no reason to be discour- 
aged, whatever reason the poets themselves have to 
be so, and I do not think that even in the short story 
our younger writers are doing better work than they 
are doing in the slighter forms of verse. Yet the notion 
of inviting business talent into this field would be as 
preposterous as that of asking it to devote itself to the 
essay. What book of verse by a recent poet, if we 
except some such peculiarly gifted poet as Mr. Whit- 
comb Riley, has paid its expenses, not to speak of any 
profit to the author? Of course, it would be rather 
more offensive and ridiculous that it should do so 
than that any other form of literary art should do 
so; and yet there is no more provision in our eco- 
nomic system for the support of the poet apart from 
his poems than there is for the support of the novelist 
apart from his novel. One could not make any more 
money by writing poetry than by writing history, 
but it is a curious fact that while the historians have 
usually been rich men, and able to afford the luxury 
of writing history, the poets have usually been poor 
men, with no pecuniary justification in their devotion 
to a calling which is so seldom an election. 

To be sure, it can be said for them that it costs far 
less to set up poet than to set up historian. There 
is no outlay for copying documents, or visiting libra- 
ries, or buying books. In fact, except as historian, 
the man of letters, in whatever walk, has not only 
none of the expenses of other men of business, but 
none of the expenses of other artists. He has no such 
outlay to make for materials, or models, or studio rent 
as the painter or the sculptor has, and his income, 
such as it is, is immediate. If he strikes the fancy 

28 



THE MAN OF LETTERS AS A MAN OF BUSINESS 

of the editor with the first thing he offers, as he very 
well may, it is as well with him as with other men 
after long years of apprenticeship. Although he will 
always be the better for an apprenticeship, and the 
longer apprenticeship the better, he may practically 
need none at all. Such are the strange conditions of 
his acceptance with the public, that he may please 
better without it than with it. An author's first book 
is too often not only his luckiest, but really his best; 
it has a brightness that dies out under the school he 
puts himself to, but a painter or a sculptor is only the 
gainer by all the school he can give himself. 



In view of this fact it becomes again very hard to 
establish the author's status in the business world, 
and at moments I have grave question whether he 
belongs there at all, except as a novelist. There is, 
of course, no outlay for him in this sort, any more than 
in any other sort of literature, but it at least supposes 
and exacts some measure of preparation. A young 
writer may produce a brilliant and very perfect ro- 
mance, just as he may produce a brilliant and very 
perfect poem, but in the field of realistic fiction, or in 
what we used to call the novel of manners, a writer 
can only produce an inferior book at the outset. For 
this work he needs experience and observation, not 
so much of others as of himself, for ultimately his char- 
acters will all come out of himself, and he will need 
to know motive and character with such thorough- 
ness and accuracy as he can acquire only through 
his own heart. A man remains in a measure strange 
to himself as long as he lives, and the very sources 
of novelty in his work will be within himself; he can 

29 



LITERATURE AND LlF£ 

continue to give it freshness in no other way than by 
knowing himself better and better. But a young 
writer and an untrained writer has not yet begun to 
be acquainted even with the lives of other men. The 
world around him remains a secret as well as the world 
within him, and both unfold themselves simultane- 
ously to that experience of joy and sorrow that can 
come only with the lapse of time. Until he is well on 
towards forty, he will hardly have assimilated the 
materials of a great novel, although he may have 
amassed them. The novelist, then, is a man of let- 
ters who is like a man of business in the necessity of 
preparation for his calling, though he does not pay 
store-rent, and may carry all his affairs under his hat, 
as the phrase is. He alone among men of letters may 
look forward tc that sort of continuous prosperity 
which follows from capacity and diligence in other 
vocations; for story-telling is now a fairly recognized 
trade, and the story-teller has a money-standing in 
the economic world. It is not a very high standing, 
I think, and I have expressed the belief that it does not 
bring him the respect felt for men in other lines of busi- 
ness. Still our people cannot deny some considera- 
tion to a man who gets a hundred dollars a thousand 
words or whose book sells five hundred thousand copies 
or less. That is a fact appreciable to business, and 
the man of letters in the line of fiction may reason- 
ably feel that his place in our civilization, though he 
may owe it to the women who form the great mass of 
his readers, has something of the character of a vested 
interest in the eyes of men. There is, indeed, as yet 
no conspiracy law which will avenge the attempt to 
injure him in his business. A critic, or a dark con- 
juration of critics, may damage him at will and to 
the extent of their power, and he has no recourse but 
to write better books, or worse. The law will do noth- 

30 



THE MAN OF LETTERS AS A MAN OF BUSINESS 

ing for him, and a boycott of his books might be preach- 
ed with immunity by any class of men not liking his 
opinions on the question of industrial slavery or anti- 
paedobaptism. Still the market for his wares is stead- 
ier than the market for any other kind of literary wares, 
and the prices are better. The historian, who is a 
kind of inferior realist, has something like the same 
steadiness in the market, but the prices he can com- 
mand are much lower, and the two branches of the 
novelist's trade are not to be compared in a business 
way. As for the essayist, the poet, the traveller, the 
popular scientist, they are nowhere in the competition 
for the favor of readers. The reviewer, indeed, has 
a pretty steady call for his work, but I fancy the re- 
viewers who get a hundred dollars a thousand words 
could all stand upon the point of a needle without 
crowding one another; I should rather like to see them 
doing it. Another gratifying fact of the situation 
is that the best writers of fiction, who are most in 
demand with the magazines, probably get nearly as 
much money for their work as the inferior novelists 
who outsell them by tens of thousands, and who make 
their appeal to the innumerable multitude of the less 
educated and less cultivated buyers of fiction in book 
form. I think they earn their money, but if I did not 
think all of the higher class of novelists earned so 
much money as they get, I should not be so invidious 
as to single out for reproach those who did not. 

The difficulty about payment, as I have hinted, is 
that literature has no objective value really, but only 
a subjective value, if I may so express it. A poem, 
an essay, a novel, even a paper on political economy, 
may be worth gold untold to one reader, and worth 
nothing whatever to another. It may be precious to 
one mood of the reader, and worthless to another mood 
of the same reader. How, then, is it to be priced, and 

31 



LITERATURE AND LIFE 

how is it to be fairly marketed? All people must be 
fed, and all people must be clothed, and all people 
must be housed; and so meat, raiment, and shelter 
are things of positive and obvious necessity, which 
may fitly have a market price put upon them. But 
there is no such positive and obvious necessity, I am 
sorry to say, for fiction, or not for the higher sort of 
fiction. The sort of fiction which corresponds in litera- 
ture to the circus and the variety theatre in the show- 
business seems essential to the spiritual health of the 
masses, but the most cultivated of the classes can get 
on, from time to time, without an artistic novel. This 
is a great pity, and I should be very willing that read- 
ers might feel something like the pangs of hunger 
and cold, when deprived of their finer fiction; but ap- 
parently they never do. Their dumb and passive 
need is apt only to manifest itself negatively, or in 
the form of weariness of this author or that. The 
publisher of books can ascertain the fact through the 
declining sales of a writer; but the editor of a maga- 
zine, who is the best customer of the best writers, must 
feel the market with a much more delicate touch. Some- 
times it may be years before he can satisfy himself that 
his readers are sick of Smith, and are pining for Jones ; 
even then he cannot know how long their mood will last, 
and he is by no means safe in cutting down Smith's 
price and putting up Jones's. With the best will in the 
world to pay justly, he cannot. Smith, who has been 
boring his readers to death for a year, may write to- 
morrow a thing that will please them so much that he 
will at once be a prime favorite again; and Jones, 
whom they have been asking for, may do something 
so uncharacteristic and alien that it will be a flat fail- 
ure in the magazine. The only thing that gives either 
writer positive value is his acceptance with the reader ; 
but the acceptance is from month to month wholly 

32 



THE MAN OF LETTERS AS A MAN OF BUSINESS 

uncertain. Authors are largely matters of fashion, 
like this style of bonnet, or that shape of gown. Last 
spring the dresses were all made with lace berthas, 
and Smith was read; this year the butterfly capes are 
worn, and Jones is the favorite author. Who shall 
forecast the fall and winter modes? 



XI 

In this inquiry it is always the author rather than 
the publisher, always the contributor rather than the 
editor, whom I am concerned for. I study the diffi- 
culties of the publisher and editor only because they 
involve the author and the contributor ; if they did not, 
I will not say with how hard a heart I should turn from 
them; my only pang now in scrutinizing the business 
conditions of literature is for the makers of literature, 
not the purveyors of it. 

After all, and in spite of my vaunting title, is the 
man of letters ever a business man? I suppose that, 
strictly speaking, he never is, except in those rare in- 
stances where, through need or choice, he is the pub- 
lisher as well as the author of his books. Then he 
puts something on the market and tries to sell it there, 
and is a man of business. But otherwise he is an 
artist merely, and is allied to the great mass of wage- 
workers who are paid for the labor they have put into 
the thing done or the thing made; who live by doing 
or making a thing, and not by marketing a thing after 
some other man has done it or made it. The quality 
of the thing has nothing to do with the economic nat- 
ure of the case; the author is, in the last analysis, 
merely a working-man, and is under the rule that gov- 
erns the working-man's life. If he is sick or sad, and 
cannot work, if he is lazy or tipsy, and will not, then 
3 33 



LITERATURE AND LIFE 

he earns nothing. He cannot delegate his business 
to a clerk or a manager; it will not go on while he is 
sleeping. The wage he can command depends strictly 
upon his skill and diligence. 

I myself am neither sorry nor ashamed for this; 
I am glad and proud to be of those who eat their bread 
in the sweat of their own brows, and not the sweat of 
other men's brows; I think my bread is the sweeter 
for it. In the mean time, I have no blame for business 
men; they are no more of the condition of things than 
we working-men are ; they did no more to cause it or 
create it; but I would rather be in my place than in 
theirs, and I wish that I could make all my fellow- 
artists realize that economically they are the same as 
mechanics, farmers, day-laborers. It ought to be our 
glory that we produce something, that we bring into 
the world something that was not choately there be- 
fore; that at least we fashion or shape something 
anew; and we ought to feel the tie that binds us to 
all the toilers of the shop and field, not as a galling 
chain, but as a mystic bond also uniting us to Him 
who works hitherto and evermore. 

I know very well that to the vast multitude of our fel- 
low-working-men we artists are the shadows of names, 
or not even the shadows. I like to look the facts in the 
face, for though their lineaments are often terrible, 
yet there is light nowhere else ; and I will not pretend, 
in this light, that the masses care any more for us than 
we care for the masses, or so much. Nevertheless, 
and most distinctly, we are not of the classes. Except 
in our work, they have no use for us; if now and then 
they fancy qualifying their material splendor or their 
spiritual dulness with some artistic presence, the at- 
tempt is always a failure that bruises and abashes. 
In so far as the artist is a man of the world, he is the 
less an artist, and if he fashions himself upon fashion, 

34 



THE MAN OF LETTERS AS A MAN OF BUSINESS 

he deforms his art. We all know that ghastly type; 
it is more absurd even than the figure which is really 
of the world, which was born and bred in it, and con- 
ceives of nothing outside of it, or above it. In the 
social world, as well as in the business world, the art- 
ist is anomalous, in the actual conditions, and he is 
perhaps a little ridiculous. 

Yet he has to be somewhere, poor fellow, and I think 
that he will do well to regard himself as in a transition 
state. He is really of the masses, but they do not know 
it, and what is worse, they do not know him; as yet 
the common people do not hear him gladly or hear 
him at all. He is apparently of the classes ; they know 
him, and they listen to him; he often amuses them 
very much ; but he is not quite at ease among them ; 
whether they know it or not, he knows that he is not 
of their kind. Perhaps he will never be at home any- 
where in the world as long as there are masses whom 
he ought to consort with, and classes whom he cannot 
consort with. The prospect is not brilliant for any 
artist now living, but perhaps the artist of the future 
will see in the flesh the accomplishment of that human 
equality of which the instinct has been divinely planted 
in the human soul. 



WORRIES OF A WINTER WALK 

THE other winter, as I was taking a morning walk 
down to the East River, I came upon a bit of our 
motley life, a fact of our piebald civilization, which 
has perplexed me from time to time, ever since, and 
which I wish now to leave with the reader, for his or 
her more thoughtful consideration. 



The morning was extremely cold. It professed to 
be sunny, and there was really some sort of hard glit- 
ter in the air, which, so far from being tempered by this 
effulgence, seemed all the stonier for it. Blasts of 
frigid wind swept the streets, and buffeted each other 
in a fury of resentment when they met around the cor- 
ners. Although I was passing through a populous 
tenement-house quarter, my way was not hindered by 
the sports of the tenement-house children, who com- 
monly crowd one from the sidewalks; no frowzy head 
looked out over the fire-escapes; there were no ped- 
dlers' carts or voices in the road- way ; not above three 
or four shawl-hooded women cowered out of the little 
shops with small purchases in their hands; not so 
many tiny girls with jugs opened the doors of the beer 
saloons. The butchers' windows were painted with 
patterns of frost, through which I could dimly see the 
frozen meats hanging like hideous stalactites from 

36 



WORRIES OF A WINTER WALK 

the roof. When I came to the river, I ached in sym- 
pathy with the shipping painfully atilt on the rock- 
like surface of the brine, which broke against the piers, 
and sprayed itself over them like showers of powdered 
quartz. 

But it was before I reached this final point that I re- 
ceived into my consciousness the moments of the hu- 
man comedy which have been an increasing burden to 
it. Within a block of the river I met a child so small 
that at first I almost refused to take any account of her, 
until she appealed to my sense of humor by her amus- 
ing disproportion to the pail which she was lugging 
in front of her with both of her little mittened hands. 
I am scrupulous about mittens, though I was tempted 
to write of her little naked hands, red with the pitiless 
cold. This would have been more effective, but it 
would not have been true, and the truth obliges me 
to own that she had a stout, warm-looking knit jacket 
on. The pail — which was half her height and twice 
her bulk — was filled to overflowing with small pieces 
of coal and coke, and if it had not been for this I might 
have taken her for a child of the better classes, she 
was so comfortably clad. But in that case she would 
have had to be fifteen or sixteen years old, in order to 
be doing so efficiently and responsibly the work which, 
as the child of the worse classes, she was actually do- 
ing at five or six. We must, indeed, allow that the 
early self-helpfulness of such children is very remark- 
able, and all the more so because they grow up into 
men and women so stupid that, according to the the- 
ories of all polite economists, they have to have their 
discontent with their conditions put into their heads 
by malevolent agitators. 

From time to time this tiny creature put down her 
heavy burden to rest ; it was, of course, only relatively 
heavy; a man would have made nothing of it. From 

37 



LITERATURE AND LIFE 

time to time she was forced to stop and pick up the bits 
of coke that tumbled from her heaping pail. She 
could not consent to lose one of them, and at last, when 
she found she could not make all of them stay on the 
heap, she thriftily tucked them into the pockets of her 
jacket, and trudged sturdily on till she met a boy some 
years older, who planted himself in her path and stood 
looking at her, with his hands in his pockets. I do 
not say he was a bad boy, but I could see in his furtive 
eye that she was a sore temptation to him. The chance 
to have fun with her by upsetting her bucket, and 
scattering her coke about till she cried with vexation, 
was one which might not often present itself, and I do 
not know what made him forego it, but I know that 
he did, and that he finally passed her, as I have seen 
a young dog pass a little cat, after having stopped it, 
and thoughtfully considered worrying it. 

I turned to watch the child out of sight, and when I 
faced about towards the river again I received the sec- 
ond instalment of my present perplexity. A cart, 
heavily laden with coke, drove out of the coal-yard 
which I now perceived I had come to, and after this 
cart followed two brisk old women, snugly clothed 
and tightly tucked in against the cold like the child, 
who vied with each other in catching up the lumps of 
coke that were jolted from the load, and filling their 
aprons with them; such old women, so hale, so spry, 
so tough and tireless, with the withered apples red in 
their cheeks, I have not often seen. They may have 
been about sixty years, or sixty-five, the time of life 
when most women are grandmothers and are relegated 
on their merits to the cushioned seats of their chil- 
dren's homes, softly silk-gowned and lace-capped, dear 
visions of lilac and lavender, to be loved and petted by 
their grandchildren. The fancy can hardly put such 
sweet ladies in the place of those nimble beldams, who 

38 



WORRIES OF A WINTER WALK 

hopped about there in the wind-swept street, plucking 
up their day's supply of firing from the involuntary 
bounty of the cart. Even the attempt is unseemly, 
and whether mine is at best but a feeble fancy, not 
bred to strenuous feats of any kind, it fails to bring 
them before me in that figure. I cannot imagine ladies 
doing that kind of thing ; I can only imagine women 
who had lived hard and worked hard all their lives 
doing it ; who had begun to fight with want from their 
cradles, like that little one with the pail, and must 
fight without ceasing to their graves. But I am not 
unreasonable; I understand and I understood what I 
saw to be one of the things that must be, for the per- 
fectly good and sufficient reason that they always 
have been; and at the moment I got what pleasure I 
could out of the stolid indifference of the cart-driver, 
who never looked about him at the scene which inter- 
ested me, but jolted onward, leaving a trail of pungent 
odors from his pipe in the freezing eddies of the air be- 
hind him. 

II 

It is still not at all, or not so much, the fact that 
troubles me ; it is what to do with the fact. The ques- 
tion began with me almost at once, or at least as soon 
as I faced about and began to walk homeward with the 
wind at my back. I was then so much more comfort- 
able that the aesthetic instinct thawed out in me, and 
I found myself wondering what use I could make of 
what I had seen in the way of my trade. Should I 
have something very pathetic, like the old grandmoth- 
er going out day after day to pick up coke for her sick 
daughter's freezing orphans till she fell sick herself? 
What should I do with the family in that case? They 
could not be left at that point, and I promptly imagined 

39 



LITERATURE AND LIFE 

a granddaughter, a girl of about eighteen, very pretty 
and rather proud, a sort of belle in her humble neigh- 
borhood, who should take her grandmother's place. 
I decided that I should have her Italian, because I 
knew something of Italians, and could manage that 
nationality best, and I should call her Maddalena; 
either Maddalena or Marina; Marina would be more 
Venetian, and I saw that I must make her Venetian. 
Here I was on safe ground, and at once the love-interest 
appeared to help me out. By virtue of the law of con- 
trasts, it appeared to me in the person of a Scandina- 
vian lover, tall, silent, blond, whom I at once felt 
I could do, from my acquaintance with Scandina- 
vian lovers in Norwegian novels. His name was 
Janssen, a good, distinctive Scandinavian name ; I 
do not know but it is Swedish ; and I thought he 
might very well be a Swede ; I could imagine his 
manner from that of a Swedish waitress we once 
had. 

Janssen — Jan Janssen, say — drove the coke-cart 
which Marina's grandmother used to follow out of the 
coke-yard, to pick up the bits of coke as they were 
jolted from it, and he had often noticed her with deep 
indifference. At first he noticed Marina — or Nina, 
as I soon saw I must call her — with the same uncon- 
cern; for in her grandmother's hood and jacket and 
check apron, with her head held shamefacedly down- 
ward, she looked exactly like the old woman. I thought 
I would have Nina make her self-sacrifice rebelliously, 
as a girl like her would be apt to do, and follow the coke- 
cart with tears. This would catch Janssen's notice, 
and he would wonder, perhaps with a little pang, what 
the old woman was crying about, and then he would 
see that it was not the old woman. He would see that 
it was Nina, and he would be in love with her at once, 
for she would not only be very pretty, but he would 

4 o 



WORRIES OF A WINTER WALK 

know that she was good, if she were willing to help 
her family in that way. 

He would respect the girl, in his dull, sluggish, 
Northern way. He would do nothing to betray him- 
self. But little by little he would begin to befriend her. 
He would carelessly overload his cart before he left the 
yard, so that the coke would fall from it more lavishly; 
and not only this, but if he saw a stone or a piece of 
coal in the street he would drive over it, so that more 
coke would be jolted from his load. 

Nina would get to watching for him. She must 
not notice him much at first, except as the driver of 
the overladen, carelessly driven cart. But after sev- 
eral mornings she must see that he is very strong and 
handsome. Then, after several mornings more, their 
eyes must meet, her vivid black eyes, with the tears 
of rage and shame in them, and his cold blue eyes. 
This must be the climax ; and just at this point I gave 
my fancy a rest, while I went into a drug-store at the 
corner of Avenue B to get my hands warm. 

They were abominably cold, even in my pockets, 
and I had suffered past several places trying to think 
of an excuse to go in. I now asked the druggist if 
he had something which I felt pretty sure he had not, 
and this put him in the wrong, so that when we fell 
into talk he was very polite. We agreed admirably 
about the hard times, and he gave way respectfully 
when I doubted his opinion that the winters were get- 
ting milder. I made him reflect that there was no 
reason for this, and that it was probably an illusion 
from that deeper impression which all experiences 
made on us in the past, when we were younger ; I ought 
to say that he was an elderly man, too. I said I fancied 
such a morning as this was not very mild for people 
that had no fires, and this brought me back again to 
Janssen and Marina, by way of the coke-cart. The 

41 



LITERATURE AND LIFE 

thought of them rapt me so far from the druggist that 
I listened to his answer with a glazing eye, and did 
not know what he said. My hands had now got warm, 
and I bade him good-morning with a parting regret, 
which he civilly shared, that he had not the thing I 
had not wanted, and I pushed out again into the cold, 
which I found not so bad as before. 
i My hero and heroine were waiting for me there, and 
I saw that to be truly modern, to be at once realistic 
and mystical, to have both delicacy and strength, I 
must not let them get further acquainted with each 
other. The affair must simply go on from day to day, 
till one morning Jan must note that it was again the 
grandmother and no longer the girl who was follow- 
ing his cart. She must be very weak from a long 
sickness — I was not sure whether to have it the grippe 
or not, but I decided upon that provisionally — and she 
must totter after Janssen, so that he must get down 
after a while to speak to her under pretence of arrang- 
ing the tail-board of his cart, or something of that kind ; 
I did not care for the detail. They should get into talk 
in the broken English which was the only language 
they could have in common, and she should burst into 
tears, and tell him that now Nina was sick ; I imagined 
making this very simple, but very touching, and I 
really made it so touching that it brought the lump 
into my own throat, and I knew it would be effective 
with the reader. Then I had Jan get back upon his 
cart, and drive stolidly on again, and the old woman 
limp feebly after. 

There should not be any more, I decided, except 
that one very cold morning, like that ; Jan should be 
driving through that street, and should be passing 
the door of the tenement house where Nina had lived, 
just as a little procession should be issuing from it. 
The fact must be told in brief sentences, with a total 

42 



WORRIES OF A WINTER WALK 

absence of emotionality. The last touch must be 
Jan's cart turning the street corner with Jan's figure 
sharply silhouetted against the clear, cold morning 
light. Nothing more. 

But it was at this point that another notion came 
into my mind, so antic, so impish, so fiendish, that if 
there were still any Evil One, in a world which gets 
on so poorly without him, I should attribute it to his 
suggestion; and this was that the procession which 
Jan saw issuing from the tenement-house door was 
not a funeral procession, as the reader will have rashly 
fancied, but a wedding procession, with Nina at the 
head of it, quite well again, and going to be married 
to the little brown youth with ear-rings who had long 
had her heart. 

With a truly perverse instinct, I saw how strong 
this might be made, at the fond reader's expense, to be 
sure, and how much more pathetic, in such a case, 
the silhouetted figure on the coke-cart would really 
be. I should, of course, make it perfectly plain that no 
one was to blame, and that the whole affair had been 
so tacit on Jan's part that Nina might very well have 
known nothing of his feeling for her. Perhaps at the 
very end I might subtly insinuate that it was possible 
he might have had no such feeling towards her as the 
reader had been led to imagine. 



Ill 

The question as to which ending I ought to have 
given my romance is what has ever since remained 
to perplex me, and it is what has prevented my ever 
writing it. Here is material of the best sort lying use- 
less on my hands, which, if I could only make up my 
mind, might be wrought into a short story as affect- 

43 



LITERATURE AND LIFE 

ing as any that wring our hearts in fiction ; and I think 
I could get something fairly unintelligible out of the 
broken English of Jan and Nina's grandmother, and 
certainly something novel. All that I can do now, 
however, is to put the case before the reader, and let 
him decide for himself how it should end. 

The mere humanist, I suppose, might say that I 
am rightly served for having regarded the fact I had 
witnessed as material for fiction at all; that I had no 
business to bewitch it with my miserable art; that I 
ought to have spoken to that little child and those 
poor old women, and tried to learn something of their 
lives from them, that I might offer my knowledge again 
for the instruction of those whose lives are easy and 
happy in the indifference which ignorance breeds in 
us. I own there is something in this, but then, on 
the other hand, I have heard it urged by nice people 
that they do not want to know about such squalid 
lives, that it is offensive and out of taste to be always 
bringing them in, and that we ought to be writing 
about good society, and especially creating grandes 
dames for their amusement. This sort of people could 
say to the humanist that he ought to be glad there are 
coke-carts for fuel to fall off from for the lower classes, 
and that here was no case for sentiment ; for if one is to 
be interested in such things at all, it must be aestheti- 
cally, though even this is deplorable in the presence 
of fiction already overloaded with low life, and so poor 
in grandes dames as ours. 



CONFESSIONS OF A SUMMER COLONIST 

THE season is ending in the little summer settlement 
on the Down East coast where I have been pass- 
ing the last three months, and with each loath day 
the sense of its peculiar charm grows more poignant. 
A prescience of the home - sickness I shall feel for it 
when I go already begins to torment me, and I find 
myself wishing to imagine some form of words which 
shall keep a likeness of it at least through the winter; 
some shadowy semblance which I may turn to here- 
after if any chance or change should destroy or trans- 
form it, or, what is more likely, if 1 should never come 
back to it. Perhaps others in the distant future may 
turn to it for a glimpse of our actual life in one of its 
most characteristic phases; I am sure that in the dis- 
tant present there are many millions of our own in- 
landers to whom it would be altogether strange. 



In a certain sort fragile is written all over our colony ; 
as far as the visible body of it is concerned it is inex- 
pressibly perishable; a fire and a high wind could 
sweep it all away; and one of the most American of 
all American things is the least fitted among them to 
survive from the present to the future, and impart to 
it the significance of what may soon be a "portion 
and parcel " of our extremely forgetful past. 

45 



LITERATURE AND LIFE 

It is also in a supremely transitional moment: one 
might say that last year it was not quite what it is 
now, and next year it may be altogether different. In 
fact, our summer colony is in that happy hour when 
the rudeness of the first summer conditions has been 
left far behind, and vulgar luxury has not yet cum- 
brously succeeded to a sort of sylvan distinction. 

The type of its simple and sufficing hospitalities is 
the seven-o'clock supper. Every one, in hotel or in 
cottage, dines between one and two, and no less scru- 
pulously sups at seven, unless it is a few extremists 
who sup at half-past seven. At this function, which 
is our chief social event, it is de rigueur for the men 
not to dress, and they come in any sort of sack or jack- 
et or cutaway, letting the ladies make up the pomps 
which they forego. From this fact may be inferred the 
informality of the men's day-time attire; and the same 
note is sounded in the whole range of the cottage life, 
so that once a visitor from the world outside, who had 
been exasperated beyond endurance by the absence 
of form among us (if such an effect could be from a 
cause so negative), burst out with the reproach, "Oh, 
you make a fetish of your informality!" 

"Fetish" is, perhaps, rather too strong a word, but I 
should not mind saying that informality was the tute- 
lary genius of the place. American men are every- 
where impatient of form. It burdens and bothers 
them, and they like to throw it off whenever they can. 
We may not be so very democratic at heart as we seem, 
but we are impatient of ceremonies that separate us 
when it is our business or our pleasure to get at one 
another; and it is part of our splendor to ignore the 
ceremonies as we do the expenses. We have all the 
decent grades of riches and poverty in our colony, but 
our informality is not more the treasure of the humble 
than of the great. In the nature of things it cannot 

46 



CONFESSIONS OF A SUMMER COLONIST 

last, however, and the only question is how long it 
will last. I think, myself, until some one imagines 
giving an eight-o'clock dinner; then all the informal- 
ities will go, and the whole train of evils which such 
a dinner connotes will rush in. 



II 

The cottages themselves are of several sorts, and 
some still exist in the earlier stages of mutation from 
the fishermen's and farmers' houses which formed 
their germ. But these are now mostly let as lodg- 
ings to bachelors and other single or semi-detached 
folks who go for their meals to the neighboring hotels 
or boarding-houses. The hotels are each the centre 
of this sort of centripetal life, as well as the homes of 
their own scores or hundreds of inmates. A single 
boarding-house gathers about it half a dozen depend- 
ent cottages which it cares for, and feeds at its table; 
and even where the cottages have kitchens and all the 
housekeeping facilities, their inmates sometimes pre- 
fer to dine at the hotels. By far the greater number 
of cottagers, however, keep house, bringing their ser- 
vice with them from the cities, and settling in their 
summer homes for three or four or five months. 

The houses conform more or less to one type : a pict- 
uresque structure of colonial pattern, shingled to the 
ground, and stained or left to take a weather-stain of 
grayish brown, with cavernous verandas, and dor- 
mer-windowed roofs covering ten or twelve rooms. 
Within they are, if not elaborately finished, elaborate- 
ly fitted up, with a constant regard to health in the 
plumbing and drainage. The water is brought in a 
system of pipes from a lake five miles away, and as it 
is only for summer use the pipes are not buried from 

47 



LITERATURE AND LIFE 

the frost, but wander along the surface, through the 
ferns and brambles of the tough little sea-side knolls 
on which the cottages are perched, and climb the old 
tumbling stone walls of the original pastures before 
diving into the cemented basements. 

Most of the cottages are owned by their occupants, 
and furnished by them; the rest, not less attractive 
and hardly less tastefully furnished, belong to natives, 
who have caught on to the architectural and domestic 
preferences of the summer people, and have built them 
to let. The rugosities of the stony pasture land end 
in a wooded point seaward, and curve east and north 
in a succession of beaches. It is on the point, and 
mainly short of its wooded extremity, that the cottages 
of our settlement are dropped, as near the ocean as 
may be, and with as little order as birds' nests in the 
grass, among the sweet-fern, laurel, bay, wild rasp- 
berries, and dog-roses, which it is the ideal to leave 
as untouched as possible. Wheel-worn lanes that 
twist about among the hollows find the cottages from 
the highway, but foot-paths approach one cottage 
from another, and people walk rather than drive to 
each other's doors. 

From the deep-bosomed, well-sheltered little harbor 
the tides swim inland, half a score of winding miles, 
up the channel of a river which without them would 
be a trickling rivulet. An irregular line of cottages 
follows the shore a little way, and then leaves the river 
to the schooners and barges which navigate it as far 
as the oldest pile-built wooden bridge in New Eng- 
land, and these in their turn abandon it to the fleets 
of row-boats and canoes in which summer youth of 
both sexes explore it to its source over depths as clear 
as glass, past wooded headlands and low, rush-bor- 
dered meadows, through reaches and openings of pas- 
toral fields, and under the shadow of dreaming groves. 

4 8 



CONFESSIONS OF A SUMMER COLONIST 

If there is anything lovelier than the scenery of this 
gentle river I do not know it ; and I doubt if the sky is 
purer and bluer in paradise. This seems to be the 
consensus, tacit or explicit, of the youth who visit it, 
and employ the landscape for their picnics and their 
water parties from the beginning to the end of summer. 

The river is very much used for sunsets by the cot- 
tagers who live on it, and who claim a superiority 
through them to the cottagers on the point. An im- 
partial mind obliges me to say that the sunsets are all 
good in our colony; there is no place from which they 
are bad; and yet for a certain tragical sunset, where 
the dying day bleeds slowly into the channel till it is 
filled from shore to shore with red as far as the eye 
can reach, the river is unmatched. 

For my own purposes, it is not less acceptable, how- 
ever, when the fog has come in from the sea like a visi- 
ble reverie, and blurred the whole valley with its white- 
ness. I find that particularly good to look at from the 
trolley-car which visits and revisits the river before 
finally leaving it, with a sort of desperation, and hid- 
ing its passion with a sudden plunge into the woods. 



Ill 

The old fishing and seafaring village, which has 
now almost lost the recollection of its first estate in its 
absorption with the care of the summer colony, was 
sparsely dropped along the highway bordering the 
harbor, and the shores of the river, where the piles of 
the time-worn wharves are still rotting. A few houses 
of the past remain, but the type of the summer cottage 
has impressed itself upon all the later building, and 
the native is passing architecturally, if not personally, 
into abeyance. He takes the situation philosophical- 
4 49 



LITERATURE AND LIFE 

ly, and in the season he caters to the summer colony 
not only as the landlord of the rented cottages, and 
the keeper of the hotels and boarding-houses, but as 
livery-stableman, grocer, butcher, marketman, apoth- 
ecary, and doctor; there is not one foreign accent in 
any of these callings. If the native is a farmer, he 
devotes himself to vegetables, poultry, eggs, and fruit 
for the summer folks, and brings these supplies to their 
doors; his children appear with flowers; and there are 
many proofs that he has accurately sized the cot- 
tagers up in their tastes and fancies as well as their 
needs. I doubt if we have sized him up so well, or if 
our somewhat conventionalized ideal of him is per- 
fectly representative. He is, perhaps, more complex 
than he seems ; he is certainly much more self-sufficing 
than might have been expected. The summer folks 
are the material from which his prosperity is wrought, 
but he is not dependent, and is very far from sub- 
missive. As in all right conditions, it is here the em- 
ployer who asks for work, not the employe ; and the 
work must be respectfully asked for. There are many 
fables to this effect, as, for instance, that of the lady 
who said to a summer visitor, critical of the week's 
wash she had brought home, "111 wash you and IT1 
iron you, but I won't take none of your jaw " A prim- 
itive independence is the keynote of the native char- 
acter, and it suffers no infringement, but rather boasts 
itself. "We're independent here, I tell you," said the 
friendly person who consented to take off the wire 
door. " I was down Bangor way doin' a piece of work, 
and a fellow come along, and says he, 'I want you 
should hurry up on that job. ' ' Hello !' says I, ' I guess 
111 pull out/ Well, we calculate to do our work," he 
added, with an accent which sufficiently implied that 
their consciences needed no bossing in the perform- 
ance. 

50 



CONFESSIONS OF A SUMMER COLONIST 

The native compliance with any summer-visiting 
request is commonly in some such form as, "Well, 
I don't know but what I can/' or, "I guess there ain't 
anything to hinder me." This compliance is so rare- 
ly, if ever, carried to the point of domestic service that 
it may fairly be said that aL the domestic service, at 
least of the cottagers, is imported. The natives will 
wait at the hotel tables; they will come in "to accom- 
modate"; but they will not "live out." I was one 
day witness of the extreme failure of a friend whose 
city cook had suddenly abandoned him, and who ap- 
plied to a friendly farmer's wife in the vain hope that 
she might help him to some one who would help his 
family out in their strait. "Why, there ain't a girl 
in the Hollow that lives out! Why, if you was sick 
abed, I don't know as I know anybody 't you could git 
to set up with you." The natives will not live out 
because they cannot keep their self-respect in the con- 
ditions of domestic service. Some people laugh at 
this self-respect, but most summer folks like it, as I 
own I do. 

In our partly mythical estimate of the native and his 
relation to us, he is imagined as holding a kind of car- 
nival when we leave him at the end of the season, and 
it is believed that he likes us to go early. We have 
had his good offices at a fair price all summer, but as 
it draws to a close they are rendered more and more 
fitfully. From some, perhaps flattered, reports of the 
happiness of the natives at the departure of the so- 
journers, I have pictured them dancing a sort of faran- 
dole, and stretching with linked hands from the far- 
thest summer cottage up the river to the last on the 
wooded point. It is certain that they get tired, and I 
could not blame them if they were glad to be rid of 
their guests, and to go back to their own social life. 
This includes church festivals of divers kinds, lectures 

51 



LITERATURE AND LIFE 

and shows, sleigh - rides, theatricals, and reading- 
clubs, and a plentiful use of books from the excellent- 
ly chosen free village library. They say frankly that 
the summer folks have no idea how pleasant it is when 
they are gone, and I am sure that the gayeties to which 
we leave them must be more tolerable than those which 
we go back to in the city. It may be, however, that 
I am too confident, and that their gayeties are only 
different. I should really like to know just what the 
entertainments are which are given in a building de- 
voted to them in a country neighborhood three or four 
miles from the village. It was once a church, but is 
now used solely for social amusements. 



IV 

The amusements of the summer colony I have al- 
ready hinted at. Besides suppers, there are also teas, 
of larger scope, both afternoon and evening. There are 
hops every week at the two largest hotels, which are 
practically free to all ; and the bathing - beach is, of 
course, a supreme attraction. The bath-houses, which 
are very clean and well equipped, are not very cheap, 
either for the season or for a single bath, and there 
is a pretty pavilion at the edge of the sands. This 
is always full of gossiping spectators of the hardy 
adventurers who brave tides too remote from the Gulf 
Stream to be ever much warmer than sixty or sixty- 
five degrees. The bathers are mostly young people, 
who have the courage of their pretty bathing-costumes 
or the inextinguishable ardor of their years. If it is 
not rather serious business with them all, still I admire 
the fortitude with which some of them remain in fif- 
teen minutes. 

Beyond our colony, which calls itself the Port, there 

52 



CONFESSIONS OF A SUMMER COLONIST 

is a far more populous watering-place, east of the Point, 
known as the Beach, which is the resort of people sev- 
eral grades of gentility lower than ours: so many, in 
fact, that we never can speak of the Beach without 
averting our faces, or, at the best, with a tolerant smile. 
It is really a succession of beaches, all much longer 
and, I am bound to say, more beautiful than ours, 
lined with rows of the humbler sort of summer cot- 
tages known as shells, and with many hotels of cor- 
responding degree. The cottages may be hired by 
the week or month at about two dollars a day, and they 
are supposed to be taken by inland people of little so- 
cial importance. Very likely this is true; but they 
seemed to be very nice, quiet people, and I commonly 
saw the ladies reading, on their verandas, books and 
magazines, while the gentlemen sprayed the dusty 
road before them with the garden hose. The place 
had also for me an agreeable alien suggestion, and in 
passing the long row of cottages I was slightly remind- 
ed of Scheveningen. 

Beyond the cottage settlements is a struggling little 
park, dedicated to the only Indian saint I ever heard 
of, though there may be others. His statue, colossal 
in sheet-lead, and painted the copper color of his race, 
offers any heathen comer the choice between a Bible 
in one of his hands and a tomahawk in the other, at 
the entrance of the park; and there are other sheet- 
lead groups and figures in the white of allegory at 
different points. It promises to be a pretty enough 
little place in future years, but as yet it is not much 
resorted to by the excursions which largely form the 
prosperity of the Beach. The concerts and the "high- 
class vaudeville " promised have not flourished in the 
pavilion provided for them, and one of two monkeys 
in the zoological department has perished of the pub- 
lic inattention. This has not fatally affected the 

53 



LITERATURE AND LIFE 

captive bear, who rises to his hind legs, and eats pea- 
nuts and doughnuts in that position like a fellow-citi- 
zen. With the cockatoos and parrots, and the dozen 
deer in an inclosure of wire netting, he is no mean 
attraction; but he does not charm the excursionists 
away from the summer village at the shore, where 
they spend long afternoons splashing among the waves, 
or in lolling groups of men, women, and children 
on the sand. In the more active gayeties, I have 
seen nothing so decided during the whole season as 
the behavior of three young girls who once came up 
out of the sea, and obliged me by dancing a measure 
on the smooth, hard beach in their bathing-dresses. 



I thought it very pretty, but I do not believe such a 
thing could have been seen on our beach, which is safe 
from all excursionists, and sacred to the cottage and 
hotel life of the Port. 

Besides our beach and its bathing, we have a read- 
ing-club for the men, evolved from one of the old na- 
tive houses, and verandaed round for summer use; 
and we have golf-links and a golf club-house within 
easy trolley reach. The links are as energetically, 
if not as generally, frequented as the sands, and the 
sport finds the favor which attends it everywhere in 
the decay of tennis. The tennis-courts which I saw 
thronged about by eager girl-crowds, here, seven years 
ago, are now almost wholly abandoned to the lovers 
of the game, who are nearly always men. 

Perhaps the only thing (besides, of course, our com- 
mon mortality) which we have in common with the 
excursionists is our love of the trolley-line. This, by 
its admirable equipment, and by the terror it inspires 

54 



CONFESSIONS OF A SUMMER COLONIST 

in horses, has wellnigh abolished driving; and fol- 
lowing the old country roads, as it does, with an occa- 
sional short-cut through the deep, green-lighted woods 
or across the prismatic salt meadows, it is of a pict- 
uresque variety entirely satisfying. After a year of 
fervent opposition and protest, the whole community 
— whether of summer or of winter folks — now gladly 
accepts the trolley, and the grandest cottager and the 
lowliest hotel dweller meet in a grateful appreciation 
of its beauty and comfort. 

Some pass a great part of every afternoon on the 
trolley, and one lady has achieved celebrity by spend- 
ing four dollars a week in trolley-rides. The exhil- 
aration of these is varied with an occasional appre- 
hension when the car pitches down a sharp incline, 
and twists almost at right angles on a sudden curve 
at the bottom without slacking its speed. A lady 
who ventured an appeal to the conductor at one such 
crisis was reassured, and at the same time taught her 
place, by his reply: "That motorman's life, ma'am, 
is just as precious to him as what yours is to 
you." 

She had, perhaps, really ventured too far, for or- 
dinarily the employes of the trolley do not find occa- 
sion to use so much severity with their passengers. 
They look after their comfort as far as possible, and 
seek even to anticipate their wants in unexpected cases, 
if I may believe a story which was told by a witness. 
She had long expected to see some one thrown out 
of the open car at one of the sharp curves, and one 
day she actually saw a woman hurled from the seat 
into the road. Luckily the woman alighted on her 
feet, and stood looking round in a daze. 

"Oh! oh!" exclaimed another woman in the seat 
behind, "she's left her umbrella!" 

The conductor promptly threw it out to her. 

55 



LITERATURE AND LIFE 

"Why/' demanded the witness, ''did that lady wish 
to get out here?" 

The conductor hesitated before he jerked the bell- 
pull to go on. Then he said, "Well, she'll want her 
umbrella, anyway." 

The conductors are, in fact, very civil as well as kind. 
If they see a horse in anxiety at the approach of the 
car, they considerately stop, and let him get by with 
his driver in safety. By such means, with their fre- 
quent trips and low fares, and with the ease and com- 
fort of their cars, they have conciliated public favor, 
and the trolley has drawn travel away from the steam 
railroad in such measure that it ran no trains last 
winter. 

VI 

The trolley, in fact, is a fad of the summer folks 
this year; but what it will be another no one knows; 
it may be their hissing and by- word. In the mean 
time, as I have already suggested, they have other 
amusements. These are not always of a nature so 
general as the trolley, or so particular as the tea. But 
each of the larger hotels has been fully supplied with 
entertainments for the benefit of their projectors, though 
nearly everything of the sort had some sort of char- 
itable slant. I assisted at a stereopticon lecture on 
Alaska for the aid of some youthful Alaskans of both 
sexes, who were shown first in their savage state, and 
then as they appeared after a merely rudimental edu- 
cation, in the costumes and profiles of our own civili- 
zation. I never would have supposed that education 
could do so much in so short a time; and I gladly 
gave my mite for their further development in classic 
beauty and a final elegance. My mite was taken up 
in a hat, which, passed round among the audience, 

56 



CONFESSIONS OF A SUMMER COLONIST 

is a common means of collecting the spectators' ex- 
pressions of appreciation. Other entertainments, of a 
prouder frame, exact an admission fee, but I am not 
sure that these are better than some of the hat-shows, 
as they are called. 

The tale of our summer amusements would be sadly 
incomplete without some record of the bull-fights given 
by the Spanish prisoners of war on the neighboring 
island, where they were confined the year of the war. 
Admission to these could be had only by favor of the 
officers in charge, and even among the e*lite of the col- 
ony those who went were a more elect few. Still, the 
day I went, there were some fifty or seventy-five spec- 
tators, who arrived by trolley near the island, and 
walked to the stockade which confined the captives. 
A real bull-fight, I believe, is always given on Sunday, 
and Puritan prejudice yielded to usage even in the 
case of a burlesque bull-fight; at any rate, it was on 
a Sunday that we crouched in an irregular semicircle 
on a rising ground within the prison pale, and faced 
the captive audience in another semicircle, across a 
little alley for the entrances and exits of the perform- 
ers. The president of the bull-fight was first brought 
to the place of honor in a hand-cart, and then came 
the banderilleros, the picadores, and the espada, won- 
derfully effective and correct in white muslin and 
colored tissue-paper. Much may be done in personal 
decoration with advertising placards; and the lofty 
mural crown of the president urged the public on both 
sides to Use Plug Cut. The picador's pasteboard 
horse was attached to his middle, fore and aft, and 
looked quite the sort of hapless jade which is or- 
dinarily sacrificed to the bulls. The toro himself was 
composed of two prisoners, whose horizontal backs were 
covered with a brown blanket ; and his feet, sometimes 
bare and sometimes shod with india-rubber boots, were 

57 



LITERATURE AND LIFE 

of the human pattern. Practicable horns, of a some- 
what too yielding substance, branched from a front of 
pasteboard, and a cloth tail, apt to come off in the 
charge, swung from his rear. I have never seen a 
genuine corrida, but a lady present, who had, told me 
that this was conducted with all the right circum- 
stance; and it is certain that the performers entered 
into their parts with the artistic gust of their race. 
The picador sustained some terrific falls, and in his 
quality of horse had to be taken out repeatedly and 
sewed up; the banderilleros tormented and eluded the 
toro with table-covers, one red and two drab, till the 
espada took him from them, and with due ceremony, 
after a speech to the president, drove his blade home 
to the bull's heart. I stayed to see three bulls killed; 
the last was uncommonly fierce, and when his hind- 
quarters came off or out, his forequarters charged 
joyously among the aficionados on the prisoners' side, 
and made havoc in their thickly packed ranks. The 
espada who killed this bull was showered with cigars 
and cigarettes from our side. 

I do not know what the Sabbath-keeping shades of 
the old Puritans made of our presence at such a f£te 
on Sunday; but possibly they had got on so far in a 
better life as to be less shocked at the decay of piety 
among us than pleased at the rise of such Christianity 
as had brought us, like friends and comrades, together 
with our public enemies in this harmless fun. I wish 
to say that the tobacco lavished upon the espada was 
collected for the behoof of all the prisoners. 



VII 

Our fiction has made so much of our summer places 
as the mise en scene of its love stories that I suppose 

58 




IN WHATEVER SORT OUR COLONISTS AMUSE THEMSELVES, IT IS 
WITH THE LEAST POSSIBLE CEREMONY" 



CONFESSIONS OF A SUMMER COLONIST 

I ought to say something of this side of our colonial 
life. But after sixty I suspect that one's eyes are 
poor for that sort of thing, and I can only say that in 
its earliest and simplest epoch the Port was particu- 
larly famous for the good times that the young people 
had. They still have good times, though whether on 
just the old terms I do not know. I know that the 
river is still here with its canoes and row-boats, its 
meadowy reaches apt for dual solitude, and its groves 
for picnics. There is not much bicycling — the roads 
are rough and hilly — but there is something of it, and 
it is mighty pretty to see the youth of both sexes 
bicycling with their heads bare. They go about bare- 
headed on foot and in buggies, too, and the young 
girls seek the tan which their mothers used so anx- 
iously to shun. 

The sail-boats, manned by weather-worn and weath- 
er-wise skippers, are rather for the pleasure of such 
older summer folks as have a taste for cod-fishing, 
which is here very good. But at every age, and in 
whatever sort our colonists amuse themselves, it is 
with the least possible ceremony. It is as if, Nature 
having taken them so hospitably to her heart, they 
felt convention an affront to her. Around their cot- 
tages, as I have said, they prefer to leave her primi- 
tive beauty untouched, and she rewards their for- 
bearance with such a profusion of wild flowers as I 
have seen nowhere else. The low, pink laurel flushed 
all the stony fields to the edges of their verandas when 
we first came; the meadows were milk-white with 
daisies; in the swampy places delicate orchids grew, 
in the pools the flags and flowering rushes; all the 
paths and way-sides were set with dog-roses ; the hol- 
lows and stony tops were broadly matted with ground 
juniper. Since then the golden-rod has passed from 
glory to glory, first mixing its yellow-powdered plumes 

59 



LITERATURE AND LIFE 

with the red-purple tufts of the iron-weed, and then 
with the wild asters everywhere. There ha r come 
later a dwarf sort, six or ten inches high, wonderfully 
rich and fine, which, with a low, white aster, seems to 
hold the field against everything else, though the tall- 
er golden-rod and the masses of the high, blue asters 
nod less thickly above it. But these smaller blooms 
deck the ground in incredible profusion, and have 
an innocent air of being stuck in, as if they had 
been fancifully used for ornament by children or Ind- 
ians. 

In a little while now, as it is almost the end of Sep- 
tember, all the feathery gold will have faded to the 
soft, pale ghosts of that loveliness. The summer birds 
have long been silent; the crows, as if they were so 
many exultant natives, are shouting in the blue sky 
above the windrows of the rowan, in jubilant prescience 
of the depopulation of our colony, which fled the hotels 
a fortnight ago. The days are growing shorter, and 
the red evenings falling earlier ; so that the cottagers' 
husbands who come up every Saturday from town 
might well be impatient for a Monday of final return. 
Those who came from remoter distances have gone 
back already ; and the lady cottagers, lingering hardily 
on till October, must find the sight of the empty hotels 
and the windows of the neighboring houses, which no 
longer brighten after the chilly nightfall, rather de- 
pressing. Every one says that this is the loveliest 
time of year, and that it will be divine here all through 
October. But there are sudden and unexpected de- 
fections; there is a steady pull of the heart cityward, 
which it is hard to resist. The first great exodus was 
on the first of the month, when the hotels were deserted 
by four-fifths of their guests. The rest followed, half 
of them within the week, and within a fortnight none 
but an all but inaudible and invisible remnant were 

60 



CONFESSIONS OF A SUMMER COLONIST 

left, who made no impression of summer sojourn in 
the deserted trolleys. 

The days now go by in moods of rapid succession. 
There have been days when the sea has lain smiling 
in placid derision of the recreants who have fled the 
lingering summer; there have been nights when the 
winds have roared round the cottages in wild menace 
of the faithful few who have remained. 

We have had a magnificent storm, which came, 
as an equinoctial storm should, exactly at the equinox, 
and for a day and a night heaped the sea upon the 
shore in thundering surges twenty and thirty feet 
high. I watched these at their awfulest, from the 
wide windows of a cottage that crouched in the very 
edge of the surf, with the effect of clutching the rocks 
with one hand and holding its roof on with the other. 
The sea was such a sight as I have not seen on ship- 
board, and while I luxuriously shuddered at it, I had 
the advantage of a mellow log-fire at my back, purring 
and softly crackling in a quiet indifference to the storm. 

Twenty-four hours more made all serene again. 
Blood-curdling tales of lobster-pots carried to sea filled 
the air; but the air was as blandly unconscious of 
ever having been a fury as a lady who has found 
her lost temper. Swift alternations of weather are so 
characteristic of our colonial climate that the other 
afternoon I went out with my umbrella against the raw, 
cold rain of the morning, and had to raise it against 
the broiling sun. Three days ago I could say that the 
green of the woods had no touch of hectic in it; but 
already the low trees of the swamp-land have flamed 
into crimson. Every morning, when I look out, this 
crimson is of a fierier intensity, and the trees on the 
distant uplands are beginning slowly to kindle, with 
a sort of inner glow which has not yet burst into a 
blaze. Here and there the golden-rod is rusting; but 

61 



LITERATURE AND LIFE 

there seems only to be more and more asters of all 
sorts ; and I have seen ladies coming home with sheaves 
of blue gentians; I have heard that the orchids are 
beginning again to light their tender lamps from the 
burning blackberry vines that stray from the past- 
ures to the edge of the swamps. 

After an apparently total evanescence there has 
been a like resuscitation of the spirit of summer so- 
ciety. In the very last week of September we have 
gone to a supper, which lingered far out of its season 
like one of these late flowers, and there has been an 
afternoon tea which assembled an astonishing number 
of cottagers, all secretly surprised to find one another 
still here, and professing openly a pity tinged with 
contempt for those who are here no longer. 

I blamed those who had gone home, but I myself 
sniff the asphalt afar; the roar of the street calls to 
me with the magic that the voice of the sea is losing. 
Just now it shines entreatingly, it shines winningly, 
in the sun which is mellowing to an October tender- 
ness, and it shines under a moon of perfect orb, which 
seems to have the whole heavens to itself in " the first 
watch of the night/' except for "the red planet Mars." 
This begins to burn in the west before the flush of sun- 
set has passed from it; and then, later, a few moon- 
washed stars pierce the vast vault with their keen 
points. The stars which so powdered the summer 
sky seem mostly to have gone back to town, where no 
doubt people take them for electric lights. 



THE EDITOR'S RELATIONS WITH THE YOUNG 
CONTRIBUTOR 

ONE of the trustiest jokes of the humorous para- 
grapher is that the editor is in great and con- 
stant dread of the young contributor; but neither my 
experience nor my observation bears out his theory 
of the case. 

Of course one must not say anything to encourage 
a young person to abandon an honest industry in the 
vain hope of early honor and profit from literature; 
but there have been and there will be literary men and 
women always, and these in the beginning have near- 
ly always been young; and I cannot see that there is 
risk of any serious harm in saying that it is to the 
young contributor the editor looks for rescue from the 
old contributor, or from his failing force and charm. 

The chances, naturally, are against the young 
contributor, and vastly against him; but if any peri- 
odical is to live, and to live long, it is by the infusion 
of new blood; and nobody knows this better than the 
editor, who may seem so unfriendly and uncareful to 
the young contributor. The strange voice, the novel 
scene, the odor of fresh woods and pastures new, the 
breath of morning, the dawn of to-morrow — these are 
what the editor is eager for, if he is fit to be an editor 
at all ; and these are what the young contributor alone 
can give him. 

A man does not draw near the sixties without wish- 
ing people to believe that he is as young as ever, and 

63 



LITERATURE AND LIFE 

he has not written almost as many books as he has lived 
years without persuading himself that each new work 
of his has all the surprise of spring ; but possibly there 
are wonted traits and familiar airs and graces in it 
which forbid him to persuade others. I do not say 
these characteristics are not charming; I am very far 
from wishing to say that; but I do say and must say 
that after the fiftieth time they do not charm for the 
first time; and this is where the advantage of the new 
contributor lies, if he happens to charm at all. 



The new contributor who does charm can have lit- 
tle notion how much he charms his first reader, who 
is the editor. That functionary may hide his pleas- 
ure in a short, stiff note of acceptance, or he may mask 
his joy in a check of slender figure; but the contribu- 
tor may be sure that he has missed no merit in his 
work, and that he has felt, perhaps far more than the 
public will feel, such delight as it can give. 

The contributor may take the acceptance as a token 
that his efforts have not been neglected, and that his 
achievements will always be warmly welcomed; that 
even his failures will be leniently and reluctantly 
recognized as failures, and that he must persist long 
in failure before the friend he has made will finally 
forsake him. 

I do not wish to paint the situation wholly rose col- 
or; the editor will have his moods, when he will not 
see so clearly or judge so justly as at other times ; when 
he will seem exacting and fastidious, and will want 
this or that mistaken thing done to the story, or poem, 
or sketch, which the author knows to be simply per- 
fect as it stands; but he is worth bearing with, and 

64 



THE EDITOR AND YOUNG CONTRIBUTOR 

he will be constant to the new contributor as long as 
there is the least hope of him. 

The contributor may be the man or the woman of 
one story, one poem, one sketch, for there are such; 
but the editor will wait the evidence of indefinite fail- 
ure to this effect. His hope always is that he or she 
is the man or the woman of many stories, many poems, 
many sketches, all as good as the first. 

From my own long experience as a magazine editor, 
I may say that the editor is more doubtful of failure 
in one who has once done well than of a second suc- 
cess. After all, the writer who can do but one good 
thing is rarer than people are apt to think in their love 
of the improbable; but the real danger with a young 
contributor is that he may become his own rival. 

What would have been quite good enough from him 
in the first instance is not good enough in the second, 
because he has himself fixed his standard so high. 
His only hope is to surpass himself, and not begin 
resting on his laurels too soon; perhaps it is never 
well, soon or late, to rest upon one's laurels. It is well 
for one to make one's self scarce, and the best way to 
do this is to be more and more jealous of perfection in 
one's work. 

The editor's conditions are that having found a 
good thing he must get as much of it as he can, and 
the chances are that he will be less exacting than the 
contributor imagines. It is for the contributor to be 
exacting, and to let nothing go to the editor as long 
as there is the possibility of making it better. He 
need not be afraid of being forgotten because he does 
not keep sending; the editor's memory is simply re- 
lentless ; he could not forget the writer who has pleased 
him if he would, for such writers are few. 

I do not believe that in my editorial service on the 
Atlantic Monthly, which lasted fifteen years in all, I 
5 65 



LITERATURE AND LIFE 

forgot the name or the characteristic quality, or even 
the handwriting, of a contributor who had pleased 
me, and I forgot thousands who did not. I never lost 
faith in a contributor who had done a good thing; to 
the end I expected another good thing from him. I 
think I was always at least as patient with him as he 
was with me, though he may not have known it. 

At the time I was connected with that periodical it 
had almost a monopoly of the work of Longfellow, 
Emerson, Holmes, Lowell, Whittier, Mrs. Stowe, Park- 
man, Higginson, Aldrich, Stedman, and many others 
not so well known, but still well known. These dis- 
tinguished writers were frequent contributors, and 
they could be counted upon to respond to almost any 
appeal of the magazine; yet the constant effort of the 
editors was to discover new talent, and their wish was 
to welcome it. 

I know that, so far as I was concerned, the success 
of a young contributor was as precious as if I had my- 
self written his paper or poem, and I doubt if it gave 
him more pleasure. The editor is, in fact, a sort of 
second self for the contributor, equally eager that he 
should stand well with the public, and able to pro- 
mote his triumphs without egotism and share them 
without vanity. 

II 

In fact, my curious experience was that if the pub- 
lic seemed not to feel my delight in a contribution I 
thought good, my vexation and disappointment were 
as great as if the work had been my own. It was even 
greater, for if I had really written it I might have had 
my misgivings of its merit, but in the case of another 
I could not console myself with this doubt. The sen- 
timent was at the same time one which I could not 

66 



THE EDITOR AND YOUNG CONTRIBUTOR 

cherish for the work of an old contributor; such a one 
stood more upon his own feet ; and the young contribu- 
tor may be sure that the editor's pride, self-interest, 
and sense of editorial infallibility will all prompt him 
to stand by the author whom he has introduced to the 
public, and whom he has vouched for. 

I hope I am not giving the young contributor too 
high an estimate of his value to the editor. After all, 
he must remember that he is but one of a great many 
others, and that the editor's affections, if constant, are 
necessarily divided. It is good for the literary aspi- 
rant to realize very early that he is but one of many ; 
for the vice of our comparatively virtuous craft is that 
it tends to make each of us imagine himself central, 
if not sole. 

As a matter of fact, however, the universe does not 
revolve around any one of us; we make our circuit of 
the sun along with the other inhabitants of the earth, 
a planet of inferior magnitude. The thing we strive 
for is recognition, but when this comes it is apt to turn 
our heads. I should say, then, that it was better it 
should not come in a great glare and a loud shout, all 
at once, but should steal slowly upcn us, ray by ray, 
breath by breath. 

In the mean time, if this happens, we shall have 
several chances of reflection, and can ask ourselves 
whether we are really so great as we seem to other 
people, or seem to seem. 

The prime condition of good work is that we shall 
get ourselves out of our minds. Sympathy we need, 
of course, and encouragement ; but I am not sure that 
the lack of these is not a very good thing, too. Praise 
enervates, flattery poisons; but a smart, brisk snub 
is always rather wholesome. 

I should say that it was not at all a bad thing for 
a young contributor to get his manuscript back, even 

6 7 



LITERATURE AND LIFE 

after a first acceptance, and even a general newspa- 
per proclamation that he is one to make the immor- 
tals tremble for their wreaths of asphodel — or is it 
amaranth? I am never sure which. 

Of course one must have one's hour, or day, or week, 
of disabling the editor's judgment, of calling him to 
one's self fool, and rogue, and wretch ; but after that, 
if one is worth while at all, one puts the rejected thing 
by, or sends it off to some other magazine, and sets 
about the capture of the erring editor with something 
better, or at least something else. 



Ill 

I think it a great pity that editors ever deal other 
than frankly with young contributors, or put them 
off with smooth generalities of excuse, instead of say- 
ing they do not like this thing or that offered them. 
It is impossible to make a criticism of all rejected man- 
uscripts, but in the case of those which show prom- 
ise I think it is quite possible; and if I were to sin my 
sins over again, I think I should sin a little more on 
the side of candid severity. I am sure I should do 
more good in that way, and I am sure that when I 
used to dissemble my real mind I did harm to those 
whose feelings I wished to spare. There ought not, 
in fact, to be question of feeling in the editor's 
mind. 

I know from much suffering of my own that it is 
terrible to get back a manuscript, but it is not fatal, 
or I should have been dead a great many times before 
I was thirty, when the thing mostly ceased for me. 
One survives it again and again, and one ought to 
make the reflection that it is not the first business of 
a periodical to print contributions of this one or of 

68 



THE EDITOR AND YOUNG CONTRIBUTOR 

that, but that its first business is to amuse and in- 
struct its readers. 

To do this it is necessary to print contributions, 
but whose they are, or how the writer will feel if they 
are not printed, cannot be considered. The editor 
can consider only what they are, and the young con- 
tributor will do well to consider that, although the 
editor may not be an infallible judge, or quite a good 
judge, it is his business to judge, and to judge without 
mercy. Mercy ought no more to qualify judgment 
in an artistic result than in a mathematical result. 



IV 

I suppose, since I used to have it myself, that there 
is a superstition with most young contributors con- 
cerning their geographical position. I used to think 
that it was a disadvantage to send a thing from a small 
or unknown place, and that it doubled my insignifi- 
cance to do so. I believed that if my envelope had 
borne the postmark of New York, or Boston, or some 
other city of literary distinction, it would have arrived 
on the editor's table with a great deal more authority. 
But I am sure this was a mistake from the first, and 
when I came to be an editor myself I constantly veri- 
fied the fact from my own dealings with contributors. 

A contribution from a remote and obscure place at 
once piqued my curiosity, and I soon learned that the 
fresh things, the original things, were apt to come 
from such places, and not from the literary centres. 

One of the most interesting facts concerning the 
arts of all kinds is that those who wish to give their 
lives to them do not appear where the appliances for 
instruction in them exist. An artistic atmosphere 
does not create artists, a literary atmosphere does not 
P 69 



LITERATURE AND LIFE 

create literators; poets and painters spring up where 
there was never a verse made or a picture seen. 

This suggests that God is no more idle now than He 
was at the beginning, but that He is still and forever 
shaping the human chaos into the instruments and 
means of beauty. It may also suggest to that scholar- 
pride, that vanity of technique, which is so apt to vaunt 
itself in the teacher, that the best he can do, after all, 
is to let the pupil teach himself. If he comes with 
divine authority to the thing he attempts, he will know 
how to use the appliances, of which the teacher is only 
the first. 

The editor, if he does not consciously perceive the 
truth, will instinctively feel it, and will expect the ac- 
ceptable young contributor from the country, the vil- 
lage, the small town, and he will look eagerly at any- 
thing that promises literature from Montana or Texas, 
for he will know that it also promises novelty. 

If he is a wise editor, he will wish to hold his hand 
as much as possible ; he will think twice before he asks 
the contributor to change this or correct that; he will 
leave him as much to himself as he can. The young 
contributor, on his part, will do well to realize this, 
and to receive all the editorial suggestions, which are > 
veiled_commands in most cases, as meekly and as J 
imaginatively as possible. 

The editor cannot always give his reasons, how- 
ever strongly he may feel them, but the contributor, 
if sufficiently docile, can always divine them. It be- 
hooves him to be docile at all times, for this is merely 
the willingness to learn ; and whether he learns that 
he is wrong, or that the editor is wrong, still he gains 
knowledge. 

A great deal of knowledge comes simply from do- 
ing, and a great deal more from doing over, and this 
is what the editor generally means. 

70 



THE EDITOR AND YOUNG CONTRIBUTOR 

I think that every author who is honest with him- 
self must own that his work would be twice as good 
if it were done twice. I was once so fortunately cir- 
cumstanced that I was able entirely to rewrite one of 
my novels, and I have always thought it the best writ- 
ten, or at least indefinitely better than it would have 
been with a single writing. As a matter of fact, near- 
ly all of them have been rewritten in a certain way. 
They have not actually been rewritten throughout, 
as in the case I speak of, but they have been gone over 
so often in manuscript and in proof that the effect has 
been much the same. 

Unless you are sensible of some strong frame with- 
in your work, something vertebral, it is best to re- 
nounce it, and attempt something else in which you 
can feel it. If you are secure of the frame you must 
observe the quality and character of everything you 
build about it ; you must touch, you must almost taste, 
you must certainly test, every material you employ; 
every bit of decoration must undergo the same scru- 
tiny as the structure. 

It will be some vague perception of the want of this 
vigilance in the young contributor's work which causes 
the editor to return it to him for revision, with those 
suggestions vhich he will do well to make the most 
of ; for when the editor once finds a contributor he can 
trust, he rejoices in him with a fondness which the 
contributor will never perhaps understand. 

It will not do to write for the editor alone; the wise 
editor understands this, and averts his countenance 
from the contributor who writes at him ; but if he feels 
that the contributor conceives the situation, and will 
conform to the conditions which his periodical has 
invented for itself, and will transgress none of its un- 
written laws; if he perceives that he has put artistic 
conscience in every general and detail, and though 

71 



LITERATURE AND LIFE 

he has not done the best, has done the best that he 
can do, he will begin to liberate him from every tram- 
mel except those he must wear himself, and will be 
only too glad to leave him free. He understands, if 
he is at all fit for his place, that a writer can do well 
only what he likes to do, and his wish is to leave him 
to himself as soon as possible. 



In my own case, I noticed that the contributors who 
could be best left to themselves were those who were 
most amenable to suggestion and even correction, who 
took the blue pencil with a smile, and bowed gladly 
to the rod of the proof-reader. Those who were on 
the alert for offence, who resented a marginal note as 
a slight, and bumptiously demanded that their work 
should be printed just as they had written it, were 
commonly not much more desired by the reader than 
by the editor. 

Of course the contributor naturally feels that the 
public is the test of his excellence, but he must not 
forget that the editor is the beginning of the public; 
and I believe he is a faithfuller and kinder critic than 
the writer will ever find again. 

Since my time there is a new tradition of editing, 
which I do not think so favorable to the young con- 
tributor as the old. Formerly the magazines were 
made up of volunteer contributions in much greater 
measure than they are now. At present most of the 
material is invited and even engaged ; it is arranged 
for a long while beforehand, and the space that can 
be given to the aspirant, the unknown good, the po- 
tential excellence, grows constantly less and less. 

A great deal can be said for either tradition; per- 

72 



THE EDITOR AND YOUNG CONTRIBUTOR 

haps some editor will yet imagine a return to the ear- 
lier method. In the mean time we must deal with the 
thing that is, and submit to it until it is changed. The 
moral to the young contributor is to be better than ever, 
to leave nothing undone that shall enhance his small 
chances of acceptance. 

If he takes care to be so good that the editor must ac- 
cept him in spite of all the pressure upon his pages, he 
will not only be serving himself best, but may be help- 
ing the editor to a conception of his duty that shall be 
more hospitable to all other young contributors. As 
it is, however, it must be owned that their hope of ac- 
ceptance is very, very small, and they will do well to 
make sure that they love literature so much that they 
can suffer long and often repeated disappointment in 
its cause. 

The love of it is the great and only test of fitness 
for it. It is really inconceivable how any one should 
attempt it without this, but apparently a great many 
do. It is evident to every editor that a vast number 
of those wh > write the things he looks at so faithful- 
ly, and read;, more or less, have no artistic motive. 

People write because they wish to be known, or be- 
cause they have heard that money is easily made in 
that way, or because they think they will chance that 
among a number of other things. The ignorance of 
technique which they often show is not nearly so dis- 
heartening as the palpable factitiousness of their prod- 
uct. It is something that they have made; it is not 
anything that has grown out of their lives. 

I should think it would profit the young contribu- 
tor, before he puts pen to paper, to ask himself why he 
does so, and, if he finds that he has no motive in the 
love of the thing, to forbear. 

Am I interested in what I am going to write about? 
Do I feel it strongly? Do I know it thoroughly? Do 

73 



LITERATURE AND LIFE 

I imagine it clearly? The young contributor had bet- 
ter ask himself all these questions, and as many more 
like them as he can think of. Perhaps he will end 
by not being a young contributor. 

But if he is able to answer them satisfactorily to 
his own conscience, by all means let him begin. He 
may at once put aside all anxiety about style; that 
is a thing that will take care of itself ; it will be added 
unto him if he really has something to say; for style 
is only a man's way of saying a thing. 

If he has not much to say, or if he has nothing to 
say, perhaps he will try to say it in some other man's 
way, or to hide his own vacuity with rags of rhetoric 
and tags and fringes of manner, borrowed from this 
author and that. He will fancy that in this disguise 
his work will be more literary, and that there is some- 
how a quality, a grace, imparted to it which will charm 
in spite of the inward hollowness. His vain hope 
would be pitiful if it were not so shameful, but it is 
destined to suffer defeat at the first glance of the edi- 
torial eye. 

If he really has something to say, however, about 
something he knows and loves, he is in the best possi- 
ble case to say it well. Still, from time to time he may 
advantageously call a halt, and consider whether he 
is saying the thing clearly and simply. 

If he has a good ear he will say it gracefully and 
musically; and I would by no means have him aim 
to say it barely or sparely. It is not so that people 
talk, who talk well, and literature is only the thought 
of the writer flowing from the pen instead of the tongue. 

To aim at succinctness and brevity merely, as some 
teach, is to practice a kind of quackery almost as of- 
fensive as the charlatanry of rhetoric. In either case 
the life goes out of the subject. 

To please one's self, honestly and thoroughly, is 

74 



THE EDITOR AND YOUNG CONTRIBUTOR 

the only way to please others in matters of art. I do 
not mean to say that if you please yourself you will 
always please others, but that unless you please your- 
self you will please no one else. It is the sweet and 
sacred privilege of work done artistically to delight 
the doer. Art is the highest joy, but any work done 
in the love of it is art, in a kind, and it strikes the note 
of happiness as nothing else can. 

We hear much of drudgery, but any sort of work 
that is slighted becomes drudgery; poetry, fiction, 
painting, sculpture, acting, architecture, if you do 
not do your best by them, turn to drudgery sore as 
digging ditches, hewing wood, or drawing water ; and 
these, by the same blessings of God, become arts if 
they are done with conscience and the sense of beauty. 

The young contributor may test his work before 
the editor assays it, if he will, and he may know by a 
rule that is pretty infallible whether it is good or not, 
from his own experience in doing it. Did it give him 
pleasure? Did he love it as it grew under his hand? 
Was he glad and willing with it? Or did he force 
himself to it, and did it hang heavy upon him? 

There is nothing mystical in all this; it is a mat- 
ter of plain, every-day experience, and I think nearly 
every artist will say the same thing about it, if he ex- 
amines himself faithfully. 

If the young contributor finds that he has no de- 
light in the thing he has attempted, he may very well 
give it up, for no one else will delight in it. But he 
need not give it up at once ; perhaps his mood is bad ; let 
him wait for a better, and try it again. He may not 
have learned how to do it well, and therefore he can- 
not love it, but perhaps he can learn to do it well. 

The wonder and glory of art is that it is without 
formulas. Or, rather, each new piece of work re- 
quires the invention of new formulas, which will not 

75 



LITERATURE AND LIFE 

serve again for another. You must apprentice your- 
self afresh at every fresh undertaking, and your mas- 
tery is always a victory over certain unexpected difficul- 
ties, and not a dominion of difficulties overcome before. 
I believe, in other words, that mastery is merely 
the strength that comes of overcoming, and is never 
a sovereign power that smooths the path of all obsta- 
cles. The combinations in art are infinite, and almost 
never the same ; you must make your key and fit it to 
each, and the key that unlocks one combination will 
not unlock another. 

VI 

There is no royal road to excellence in literature, 
but the young contributor need not be dismayed at 
that. Royal roads are the ways that kings travel, 
and kings are mostly dull fellows, and rarely have a 
good time. They do not go along singing ; the spring 
that trickles into the mossy log is not for them, nor 

"The wildwood flower that simply blows." 

But the traveller on the country road may stop for 
each of these ; and it is not a bad condition of his prog- 
ress that he must move so slowly that he can learn 
every detail of the landscape, both earth and sky, by 
heart. 

The trouble with success is that it is apt to leave 
life behind, or apart. The successful writer especial- 
ly is in danger of becoming isolated from the reali- 
ties that nurtured in him the strength to win success. 
When he becomes famous, he becomes precious to 
criticism, to society, to all the things that do not exist 
from themselves, or have not the root of the matter in 
them. 

76 



THE EDITOR AND YOUNG CONTRIBUTOR 

Therefore, I think that a young writer's upward 
course should be slow and beset with many obstacles, 
even hardships. Not that I believe in hardships as 
having inherent virtues; I think it is stupid to regard 
them in that way; but they oftener bring out the virt- 
ues inherent in the sufferer from them than what I 
may call the softships ; and at least they stop him, and 
give him time to think. 

This is the great matter, for if we prosper forward 
rapidly, we have no time for anything but prospering 
forward rapidly. We have no time for art, even the 
art by which we prosper. 

I would have the young contributor above all things 
realize that success is not his concern. Good work, 
true work, beautiful work is his affair, and nothing 
else. If he does this, success will take care of itself. 

He has no business to think of the thing that will 
take. It is the editor's business to think of that, and 
it is the contributor's business to think of the thing 
that he can do with pleasure, the high pleasure that 
comes from the sense of worth in the thing done. Let 
him do the best he can, and trust the editor to decide 
whether it will take. 

It will take far oftener than anything he attempts 
perfunctorily; and even if the editor thinks it will not 
take, and feels obliged to return it for that reason, he 
will return it with a real regret, with the honor and 
affection which we cannot help feeling for any one 
who has done a piece of good work, and with the will 
and the hope to get something from him that will take 
the next time, or the next, or the next. 



SUMMER ISLES OF EDEN 

IT may be all an illusion of the map, where the Sum- 
mer Islands glimmer a small and solitary little 
group of dots and wrinkles, remote from continental 
shores, with a straight line descending southeast- 
wardly upon them, to show how sharp and swift the 
ship's course is, but they seem so far and alien from 
my wonted place that it is as if I had slid down a 
steepy slant from the home-planet to a group of as- 
teroids nebulous somewhere in middle space, and 
were resting there, still vibrant from the rush of the 
meteoric fall. There were, of course, facts and inci- 
dents contrary to such a theory: a steamer starting 
from New York in the raw March morning, and 
lurching and twisting through two days of diagonal 
seas, with people aboard dining and undining, and 
talking and smoking and cocktailing and hot-scotch- 
ing and beef-teaing; but when the ship came in 
sight of the islands, and they began to lift their 
cedared slopes from the turquoise waters, and to 
explain their drifted snows as the white walls and 
white roofs of houses, then the waking sense became 
the dreaming sense, and the sweet impossibility of 
that drop through air became the sole reality. 



Everything here, indeed, is so strange that you 
placidly accept whatever offers itself as the simplest 

78 



SUMMER ISLES OF EDEN 

and naturalest fact. Those low hills, that climb, 
with their tough, dark cedars, from the summer sea 
to the summer sky, might have drifted down across 
the Gulf Stream from the coast of Maine; but when, 
upon closer inspection, you find them skirted with 
palms and bananas, and hedged with oleanders, you 
merely wonder that you had never noticed these 
growths in Maine before, where you were so familiar 
with the cedars. The hotel itself, which has brought 
the Green Mountains with it, in every detail, from the 
dormer-windowed mansard-roof, and the white-painted, 
green-shuttered walls, to the neat, school-mistressly 
waitresses in the dining-room, has a clump of pal- 
mettos beside it, swaying and sighing in the tropic 
breeze, and you know that when it migrates back to 
the New England hill-country, at the end of the sea- 
son, you shall find it with the palmettos still before 
its veranda, and equally at home, somewhere in the 
Vermont or New Hampshire July. There will be the 
same American groups looking out over them, and 
rocking and smoking, though, alas! not so many 
smoking as rocking. 

But where, in that translation, would be the gold- 
braided red or blue jackets of the British army and 
navy which lend their lustre and color here to the ve- 
randa groups? Where should one get the house walls 
of whitewashed stone and the garden walls which 
everywhere glow in the sun, and belt in little spaces 
full of roses and lilies? These things must come 
from some other association, and in the case of him 
who here confesses, the lustrous uniforms and the 
glowing walls rise from waters as far away in time 
as in space, and a long-ago apparition of Venetian 
Junes haunts the coral shore. (They are beginning 
to say the shore is not coral ; but no matter. ) To be 
sure, the white roofs are not accounted for in this 

79 



LITERATURE AND LIFE 

visionary presence ; and if one may not relate them to 
the snowfalls of home winters, then one must frankly 
own them absolutely tropical, together with the green- 
pillared and green-latticed galleries. They at least 
suggest the tropical scenery of Prue and I as one re- 
members seeing it through Titbottom's spectacles; 
and yet, if one supplies roofs of brown-red tiles, it is 
all Venetian enough, with the lagoon -like expanses 
that lend themselves to the fond effect. It is so Vene- 
tian, indeed, that it wants but a few silent gondolas 
and noisy gondoliers, in place of the dark, taciturn 
oarsmen of the clumsy native boats, to complete the 
coming and going illusion; and there is no good rea- 
son why the rough little isles that fill the bay should 
not call themselves respectively San Giorgio and San 
Clemente, and Sant' Elena and San Lazzaro: they 
probably have no other names! 



n 

These summer isles of Eden have this advantage 
over the scriptural Eden, that apparently it was not 
woman and her seed who were expelled, when once she 
set foot here, but the serpent and his seed : women now 
abound in the Summer Islands, and there is not a 
snake anywhere to be found. There are some tor- 
toises and a great many frogs in their season, but no 
other reptiles. The frogs are fabled of a note so deep 
and hoarse that its vibration almost springs the en- 
vironing mines of dynamite, though it has never yet 
done so ; the tortoises grow to a great size and a patri- 
archal age, and are fond of Boston brown bread and 
baked beans, if their preferences may be judged from 
those of a colossal specimen in the care of an Amer- 
ican family living on the islands. The observer who 

80 



SUMMER ISLES OF EDEN 

contributes this fact to science is able to report the 
case of a parrot-fish, on the same premises, so exactly 
like a large brown and purple cockatoo that, seeing 
such a cockatoo later on dry land, it was with a sense 
of something like cruelty in its exile from its native 
waters. The angel-fish he thinks not so much like 
angels; they are of a transparent purity of substance, 
and a cherubic innocence of expression, but they ter- 
minate in two tails, which somehow will not lend them- 
selves to the resemblance. 

Certainly the angel-fish is not so well named as 
the parrot-fish; it might better be called the ghost- 
fish, it is so like a moonbeam in the pools it haunts, 
and of such a convertible quality with the iridescent 
vegetable growths about it. All things here are of a 
weird convertibility to the alien perception, and the 
richest and rarest facts of nature lavish themselves 
in humble association with the commonest and most 
familiar. You drive through long stretches of way- 
side willows, and realize only now and then that these 
willows are thick clumps of oleanders; and through 
them you can catch glimpses of banana-orchards, 
which look like dishevelled patches of gigantic corn- 
stalks. The fields of Easter lilies do not quite live 
up to their photographs; they are presently suffering 
from a mysterious blight, and their flowers are not 
frequent enough to lend them that sculpturesque ef- 
fect near to, which they wear as far off as New York. 
The potato-fields, on the other hand, are of a tender 
delicacy of coloring which compensates for the lilies' 
lack, and the palms give no just cause for complaint, 
unless because they are not nearly enough to char- 
acterize the landscape, which in spite of their pres- 
ence remains so northern in aspect. They were much 
whipped and torn by a late hurricane, which afflicted 
all the vegetation of the islands, and some of the royal 
* 81 



LITERATURE AND LIFE 

palms were blown down. Where these are yet stand- 
ing, as four or five of them are in a famous avenue now 
quite one-sided, they are of a majesty befitting that 
of any king who could pass by them: no sovereign 
except Philip of Macedon in his least judicial moments 
could pass between them. 

The century-plant, which here does not require pam- 
pering under glass, but boldly takes its place out- 
doors with the other trees of the garden, employs much 
less than a hundred years to bring itself to bloom. It 
often flowers twice or thrice in that space of time, and 
ought to take away the reproach of the inhabitants for 
a want of industry and enterprise : a century-plant at 
least could do no more in any air, and it merits praise 
for its activity in the breath of these languorous seas. 
One such must be in bloom at this very writing, in the 
garden of a house which this very writer marked for 
his own on his first drive ashore from the steamer to the 
hotel, when he bestowed in its dim, unknown interior 
one of the many multiples of himself which are now 
pretty well dispersed among the pleasant places of the 
earth. It fills the night with a heavy heliotropean 
sweetness, and on the herb beneath, in the effulgence 
of the waxing moon, the multiple which has spirit- 
ually expropriated the legal owners stretches itself in 
an interminable reverie, and hears Youth come laugh- 
ing back to it on the waters kissing the adjacent shore, 
where other white houses (which also it inhabits) 
bathe their snowy underpinning. In this dream the 
multiple drives home from the balls of either hotel 
with the young girls in the little victorias which must 
pass its sojourn ; and, being but a vision itself, fore- 
casts the shapes of flirtation which shall night - long 
gild the visions of their sleep with the flash of mil- 
itary and naval uniforms. Of course the multiple 
has been at the dance too (with a shadowy heart- 

82 



SUMMER ISLES OF EDEN 

ache for the dances of forty years ago), and knows 
enough not to confuse the uniforms. 



nr 

In whatever way you walk, at whatever hour, the 
birds are sweetly calling in the way-side oleanders 
and the wild sage-bushes and the cedar-tops. They 
are mostly cat-birds, quite like our own ; and bluebirds, 
but of a deeper blue than ours, and redbirds of as liquid 
a note, but not so varied, as that of the redbirds of our 
woods. How came they all here, seven hundred miles 
from any larger land? Some think, on the stronger 
wings of tempests, for it is not within the knowledge 
of men that men brought them. Men did, indeed, bring 
the pestilent sparrows which swarm about their hab- 
itations here, and beat away the gentler and lovelier 
birds with a ferocity unknown in the human occupa- 
tion of the islands. Still, the sparrows have by no 
means conquered, and in the wilder places the cat- 
bird makes common cause with the bluebird and the 
redbird, and holds its own against them. The little 
ground-doves mimic in miniature the form and mark- 
ings and the gait and mild behavior of our turtle-doves, 
but perhaps not their melancholy cooing. Nature 
has nowhere anything prettier than these exquisite 
creatures, unless it be the long-tailed white gulls which 
sail over the emerald shallows of the land-locked seas, 
and take the green upon their translucent bodies as 
they trail their meteoric splendor against the mid-day 
sky. Full twenty-four inches they measure from the beak 
to the tip of the single pen that protracts them a foot be- 
yond their real bulk; but it is said their tempers are 
shorter than they, and they attack fiercely anything they 
suspect of too intimate a curiosity concerning their nests. 

83 



LITERATURE AND LIFE 

They are probably the only short-tempered things 
in the Summer Islands, where time is so long that if 
you lose your patience you easily find it again. Sweet- 
ness, if not light, seems to be the prevailing human 
quality, and a good share of it belongs to such of the 
natives as are in no wise light. Our poor brethren 
of a different pigment are in the large majority, and 
they have been seventy years out of slavery, with the 
full enjoyment of all their civil rights, without lifting 
themselves from their old inferiority. They do the 
hard work, in their own easy way, and possibly do not 
find life the burden they make it for the white man, 
whom here, as in our own country, they load up with 
the conundrum which their existence involves for 
him. They are not very gay, and do not rise to a joke 
with that flashing eagerness which they show for it 
at home. If you have them against a background 
of banana-stems, or low palms, or feathery canes, 
nothing could be more acceptably characteristic of 
the air and sky; nor are they out of place on the box 
of the little victorias, where visitors of the more in- 
quisitive sex put them to constant question. Such 
visitors spare no islander of any color. Once, in the 
pretty Public Garden which the multiple had claimed 
for its private property, three unmerciful American 
women suddenly descended from the heavens and be- 
gan to question the multiple's gardener, who was 
peacefully digging at the rate of a spadeful every five 
minutes. Presently he sat down on his wheelbarrow, 
and then shifted, without relief, from one handle of it to 
the other. Then he rose and braced himself desperately 
against the tool-house, where, when his tormentors drift- 
ed away, he seemed to the soft eye of pity pinned to the 
wall by their cruel interrogations, whose barbed points 
were buried in the stucco behind him, and whose feath- 
ered shafts stuck out half a yard before his breast. 

8 4 




PADRE GIACOMO ISSAVERDENS 



SUMMER ISLES OF EDEN 

Whether he was black or not, pity could not see, 
but probably he was. At least the garrison of the 
islands is all black, being a Jamaican regiment of 
that color; and when one of the warriors comes down 
the white street, with his swagger-stick in his hand, 
and flaming in scarlet and gold upon the ground of 
his own blackness, it is as if a gigantic oriole were 
coming towards you, or a mighty tulip. These gor- 
geous creatures seem so much readier than the natives 
to laugh, that you wish to test them with a joke. 
But it might fail. The Summer Islands are a British 
colony, and the joke does not flourish so luxuriantly 
here as some other things. 

To be sure, one of the native fruits seems a sort of 
joke when you hear it first named, and when you are 
offered a loquat, if you are of a frivolous mind you 
search your mind for the connection with loquor which 
it seems to intimate. Failing in this, you taste the 
fruit, and then, if it is not perfectly ripe, you are as 
far from loquaciousness as if you had bitten a green 
persimmon. But if it is ripe, it is delicious, and may 
be consumed indefinitely. It is the only native fruit 
which one can wish to eat at all, with an unpractised 
palate, though it is claimed that with experience a 
relish may come for the pawpaws. These break out 
in clusters of the size of oranges at the top of a thick 
pole, which may have some leaves or may not, and 
ripen as they fancy in the indefinite summer. They 
are of the color and flavor of a very insipid little musk- 
melon which has grown too near a patch of squashes. 

One may learn to like this pawpaw, yes, but one 
must study hard. It is best when plucked by a young 
islander of Italian blood whose father orders him up 
the bare pole in the sunny Sunday morning air to 
oblige the signori, and then with a pawpaw in either 
hand stands talking with them about the two bad 

85 



LITERATURE AND LIFE 

years there have been in Bermuda, and the probabil- 
ity of his doing better in Nuova York. He has not 
imagined our winter, however, and he shrinks from 
its boldly pictured rigors, and lets the signori go 
with a sigh, and a bunch of pink and crimson roses. 
The roses are here, budding and blooming in the 
quiet bewilderment which attends the flowers and 
plants from the temperate zone in this latitude, and 
which in the case of the strawberries offered with cream 
and cake at another public garden expresses itself in 
a confusion of red, ripe fruit and white blossoms on 
the same stem. They are a pleasure to the nose and 
eye rather than the palate, as happens with so many 
growths of the tropics, if indeed the Summer Islands 
are tropical, which some plausibly deny ; though why 
should not strawberries, fresh picked from the plant 
in mid-March, enjoy the right to be indifferent sweet? 



IV 

What remains? The events of the Summer Isl- 
ands are few, and none out of the order of athletics 
between teams of the army and navy, and what may 
be called societetics, have happened in the past en- 
chanted fortnight. But far better things than events 
have happened : sunshine and rain of such like qual- 
ity that one could not grumble at either, and gales, 
now from the south and now from the north, with the 
languor of the one and the vigor of the other in them. 
There were drives upon drives that were always to 
somewhere, but would have been delightful the same 
if they had been mere goings and comings, past the 
white houses overlooking little lawns through the 
umbrage of their palm-trees. The lawns professed to 
be of grass, but were really mats of close little herbs 

86 




GROTESQUE WITH WIND-WORN AND WAVE-WORN ROCKS 




A BERMUDA HOUSE 



SUMMER ISLES OF EDEN 

which were not grass; but which, where the sparse 
cattle were grazing them, seemed to satisfy their in- 
exacting stomachs. They are never very green, and 
in fact the landscape often has an air of exhaustion 
and pause which it wears with us in late August; and 
why not, after all its interminable, innumerable sum- 
mers? Everywhere in the gentle hollows which the 
coral hills (if they are coral) sink into are the patches 
of potatoes and lilies and onions drawing their geo- 
metrical lines across the brown - red, weedless soil ; 
and in very sheltered spots are banana-orchards which 
are never so snugly sheltered there but their broad 
leaves are whipped to shreds. The white road winds 
between gray walls crumbling in an amiable disin- 
tegration, but held together against ruin by a net- 
work of maidenhair ferns and creepers of unknown 
name, and overhung by trees where the cactus climbs 
and hangs in spiky links, or if another sort, pierces 
them with speary stems as tall and straight as the 
stalks of the neighboring bamboo. The loquat-trees 
cluster like quinces in the garden closes, and show 
their pale golden, plum-shaped fruit. 

For the most part the road runs by still inland waters, 
but sometimes it climbs to the high downs beside the 
open sea, grotesque with wind-worn and wave-worn 
rocks, and beautiful with opalescent beaches, and the 
black legs of the negro children paddling in the tints 
of the prostrate rainbow. 

All this seems probable and natural enough at the 
writing; but how will it be when one has turned one's 
back upon it? Will it not lapse into the gross fable 
of travellers, and be as the things which the liars who 
swap them cannot themselves believe? What will 
be said to you when you tell that in the Summer Isl- 
ands one has but to saw a hole in his back yard and 
take out a house of soft, creamy sandstone and set it 

87 



LITERATURE AND LIFE 

up and go to living in it? What, when you relate 
that among the northern and southern evergreens 
there are deciduous trees which, in a clime where there 
is no fall or spring, simply drop their leaves when they 
are tired of keeping them on, and put out others when 
they feel like it? What, when you pretend that in the 
absence of serpents there are centipedes a span long, 
and spiders the bigness of bats, and mosquitoes that 
sweetly sing in the drowsing ear, but bite not; or that 
there are swamps but no streams, and in the marshes 
stand mangrove - trees whose branches grow down- 
ward into the ooze, as if they wished to get back into 
the earth and pull in after them the holes they emerged 
from? 

These every-day facts seem not only incredible to 
the liar himself, even in their presence, but when you 
begin the ascent of that steep slant back to New York 
you foresee that they will become impossible. As 
impossible as the summit of the slant now appears to 
the sense which shudderingly figures it a Bermuda 
pawpaw-tree seven hundred miles high, and fruiting 
icicles and snowballs in the March air! 



WILD FLOWERS OF THE ASPHALT 

LOOKING through Mrs. Caroline A. Creevey's charm- 
* ing book on the Flowers of Field, Hill, and 
Swamp, the other day, I was very forcibly reminded 
of the number of these pretty, wilding growths which 
I had been finding all the season long among the 
streets of asphalt and the sidewalks of artificial stone 
in this city; and I am quite sure that any one who 
has been kept in New York, as I have been this year, 
beyond the natural time of going into the country, 
can have as real a pleasure in this sylvan invasion 
as mine, if he will but give himself up to a sense of it. 



Of course it is altogether too late, now, to look for 
any of the early spring flowers, but I can recall the 
exquisite effect of the tender blue hepatica fringing 
the centre rail of the grip-cars, all up and down Broad- 
way, and apparently springing from the hollow be- 
neath, where the cable ran with such a brooklike 
gurgle that any damp-living plant must find itself at 
home there. The water-pimpernel may now be seen, 
by any sympathetic eye, blowing delicately along the 
track, in the breeze of the passing cabs, and elas- 
tically lifting itself from the rush of the cars. The 
reader can easily verify it by the picture in Mrs, Cree- 

89 



LITERATURE AND LIFE 

vey's book. He knows it by its other name of brook- 
weed; and he will have my delight, I am sure, in the 
cardinal-flower which will be with us in August. It 
is a shy flower, loving the more sequestered nooks, 
and may be sought along the shady stretches of Third 
Avenue, where the Elevated Road overhead forms a 
shelter as of interlacing boughs. The arrow-head likes 
such swampy expanses as the converging surface roads 
form at Dead Man's Curve and the corners of Twenty- 
third Street. This is in flower now, and will be till 
September; and St-John's-wort, which some call the 
false golden-rod, is already here. You may find it in 
any moist, low ground, but the gutters of Wall Street, 
or even the banks of the Stock Exchange, are not too 
dry for it. The real golden-rod is not much in evidence 
with us, for it comes only when summer is on the wane. 
The other night, however, on the promenade of the 
Madison Square Roof Garden, I was delighted to see 
it growing all over the oblong dome of the auditorium, 
in response to the cry of a homesick cricket which 
found itself in exile there at the base of a potted ever- 
green. This lonely insect had no sooner sounded its 
winter-boding note than the fond flower began sj^m- 
pathetically to wave and droop along those tarry 
slopes, as I have seen it on how many hill-side past- 
ures! But this may have been only a transitory re- 
sponse to the cricket, and I cannot promise the visitor 
to the Roof Garden that he will find golden-rod there 
every night. I believe there is always Golden Seal, 
but it is the kind that comes in bottles, and not in the 
gloom of "deep, cool, moist woods," where Mrs. Cree- 
vey describes it as growing, along with other wildings 
of such sweet names or quaint as Celandine, and 
Dwarf Larkspur, and Squirrel-corn, and Dutchman's- 
breeches, and Pearlwort, and Wood-sorrel, and Bish- 
op's -cap, and Wintergreen, and Indian -pipe, and 

90 




SUCH SWAMPY EXPANSES AS THE CONVERGING* SURFACE ROADS 
FORM AT DEAD MAN'S CURVE " 



WILD FLOWERS OF THE ASPHALT 

Snowberry, and Adder 's-tongue, and Wakerobin, and 
Dragon-root, and Adam-and-Eve, and twenty more, 
which must have got their names from some fairy of 
genius. ,1 should say it was a female fairy of genius 
who called them so, and that she had her own sex 
among mortals in mind when she invented their 
nomenclature, and was thinking of little girls, and 
slim, pretty maids, and happy young wives. The 
author tells how they all look, with a fine sense of 
their charm in her words, but one would know how 
they looked from their names ; and when you call them 
over they at once transplant themselves to the depths 
of the dells between our sky-scrapers, and find a 
brief sojourn in the cavernous excavations whence 
other sky-scrapers are to rise. 



n 

That night on the Roof Garden, when the cricket's 
cry flowered the dome with golden-rod, the tall stems 
of rye growing among the orchestra sloped all one way 
at times, just like the bows of violins, in the half-dol- 
lar gale that always blows over the city at that height. 
But as one turns the leaves of Mrs. Creevey's magic 
book — perhaps one ought to say turns its petals — 
the forests and the fields come and make themselves 
at home in the city everywhere. By virtue of it I have 
been more in the country in a half-hour than if I had 
lived all June there. When I lift my eyes from its 
pictures or its letter-press my vision prints the eidolons 
of wild flowers everywhere, as it prints the image of 
the sun against the air after dwelling on his bright- 
ness. The rose-mallow flaunts along Fifth Avenue 
and the golden threads of the dodder embroider the 
house fronts on the principal cross streets ; and I might 

9i 



LITERATURE AND LIFE 

think at times that it was all mere fancy, it has so 
much the quality of a pleasing illusion. 

Yet Mrs. Creevey's book is not one to lend itself to 
such a deceit by any of the ordinary arts. It is rather 
matter of fact in form and manner, and largely owes 
what magic it has to the inherent charm of its sub- 
ject. One feels this in merely glancing at the index, 
and reading such titles of chapters as " Wet Meadows 
and Low Grounds"; "Dry Fields — Waste Places — 
Waysides "; " Hills and Rocky Woods, Open Woods " ; 
and "Deep, Cool, Moist Woods"; each a poem in it- 
self, lyric or pastoral, and of a surpassing opulence of 
suggestion. The spring and summer months pass in 
stately processional through the book, each with her 
fillet inscribed with the names of her characteristic 
flowers or blossoms, and brightened with the blooms 
themselves. 

They are plucked from where nature bade them 
grow in the wild places, or their own wayward wills 
led them astray. A singularly fascinating chapter 
is that called "Escaped from Gardens," in which some 
of these pretty runagates are catalogued. I supposed 
in my liberal ignorance that the Bouncing Bet was 
the only one of these, but I have learned that the Pansy 
and the Sweet Violet love to gad, and that the Cara- 
way, the Snapdragon, the Prince's Feather, the Sum- 
mer Savory, the Star of Bethlehem, the Day-Lily, and 
the Tiger-Lily, and even the sluggish Stone Crop are 
of the vagrant, fragrant company. One is not sur- 
prised to meet the Tiger - Lily in it ; that must al- 
ways have had the jungle in its heart ; but that the 
Baby's Breath should be found wandering by the 
road-sides from Massachusetts and Virginia to Ohio, 
gives one a tender pang as for a lost child. Per- 
haps the poor human tramps, who sleep in barns and 
feed at back doors along those dusty ways, are mind- 

92 



WILD FLOWERS OF THE ASPHALT 

ful of the Baby's Breath, and keep a kindly eye 
out for the little truant. 



Ill 

As I was writing those homely names I felt again 
how fit and lovely they were, how much more fit and 
lovely than the scientific names of the flowers. Mrs. 
Creevey will make a botanist of you if you will let her, 
and I fancy a very good botanist, though I cannot 
speak from experience, but she will make a poet of 
you in spite of yourself, as I very well know ; and she 
will do this simply bjr giving you first the familiar 
name of the flowers she loves to write of. I am not say- 
ing that the Day-Lily would not smell as sweet by her 
title of Hemerocallis Fulva, or that the homely, hearty 
Bouncing Bet would not kiss as deliciously in her 
scholar's cap and gown of Saponaria Officinalis; but 
merely that their college degrees do not lend them- 
selves so willingly to verse, or even melodious prose, 
which is what the poet is often after nowadays. So 
I like best to hail the flowers by the names that the 
fairies gave them, and the children know them by, 
especially when my longing for them makes them 
grow here in the city streets. I have a fancy that 
they would all vanish away if I saluted them in botan- 
ical terms. As long as I talk of cat-tail rushes, the 
homeless grimalkins of the areas and the back fences 
help me to a vision of the swamps thickly studded 
with their stiff spears ; but if I called them Typha Lati- 
folia, or even Typha Angustifolia, there is not the 
hardiest and fiercest prowler of the roof and the fire- 
escape but would fly the sound of my voice and leave 
me forlorn amid the withered foliage of my dream. 
The street sparrows, pestiferous and persistent as they 
are, would forsake my sylvan pageant if I spoke of the 

93 



LITERATURE AND LIFE 

Bird-foot Violet as the Viola Pedata; and the com- 
monest cur would run howling if he heard the gentle 
Poison Dogwood maligned as the Rhus Venenata. 
The very milk-cans would turn to their native pumps 
in disgust from my attempt to invoke our simple Amer- 
ican Cowslip as the Dodecatheon Meadia. 



IV 

Yet I do not deny that such scientific nomenclature 
has its uses; and I should be far from undervaluing 
this side of Mrs. Creevey's book. In fact, I secretly 
respect it the more for its botanical lore, and if ever I 
get into the woods or fields again I mean to go up to 
some of the humblest flowers, such as I can feel my- 
self on easy terms with, and tell them what they are 
in Latin. I think it will surprise them, and I dare 
say they will some of them like it, and will want their 
initials inscribed on their leaves, like those signatures 
which the medicinal plants bear, or are supposed to 
bear. But as long as I am engaged in their culture 
amid this stone and iron and asphalt, I find it best 
to invite their presence by their familiar names, and I 
hope they will not think them too familiar. I should 
like to get them all naturalized here, so that the thou- 
sands of poor city children, who never saw them grow- 
ing in their native places, might have some notion of 
how bountifully the world is equipped with beauty, 
and how it is governed by many laws which are not 
enforced by policemen. I think that would interest 
them very much, and I shall not mind their plucking 
my Barmecide blossoms, and carrying them home by 
the armf uls. When good-will costs nothing we ought to 
practise it even with the tramps, and these are very wel- 
come, in their wanderings over the city pave, to rest their 
weary limbs in any of my pleached bowers they come to. 

94 




I CANNOT PROMISE THE VISITOR TO THE ROOF GARDEN THAT HE 
WILL FIND GOLDEN-ROD THERE EVERY NIGHT " 



LAST DAYS IN A DUTCH HOTEL 

(1897) 

WHEN we said that we were going to Schevenin- 
gen, in the middle of September, the portier of 
the hotel at The Hague was sure we should be very 
cold, perhaps because we had suffered so much in his 
house already; and he was right, for the wind blew 
with a Dutch tenacity of purpose for a whole week, so 
that the guests thinly peopling the vast hostelry seemed 
to rustle through its chilly halls and corridors like so 
many autumn leaves. We were but a poor hundred 
at most where five hundred would not have been a 
crowd ; and, when we sat down at the long tables d'hote 
in the great dining-room, we had to warm our hands 
with our plates before we could hold our spoons. From 
time to time the weather varied, as it does in Europe 
(American weather is of an exemplary constancy in 
comparison), and three or four times a day it rained, 
and three or four times it cleared; but through all the 
wind blew cold and colder. We were promised, how- 
ever, that the hotel would not close till October, and 
we made shift, with a warm chimney in one room and 
three gas-burners in another, if not to keep warm quite, 
yet certainly to get used to the cold. 



In the mean time the sea-bathing went resolutely 
on with all its forms. Every morning the bathing- 

95 



LITERATURE AND LIFE 

machines were drawn down to the beach from the espla- 
nade, where they were secured against the gale every 
night; and every day a half-dozen hardy invalids 
braved the rigors of wind and wave. At the discreet 
distance which one ought always to keep one could 
not always be sure whether these bold bathers were 
mermen or mermaids; for the sea costume of both 
sexes is the same here, as regards an absence of skirts 
and a presence of what are, after the first plunge, ef- 
fectively tights. The first time I walked down to 
the beach I was puzzled to make out some object roll- 
ing about in the low surf, which looked like a barrel, 
and which two bathing-machine men were watching 
with apparently the purpose of fishing it out. Sud- 
denly this object reared itself from the surf and floun- 
dered towards the steps of a machine; then I saw that 
it was evidently not a barrel, but a lady, and after 
that I never dared carry my researches so far. I sup- 
pose that the bathing-tights are more becoming in some 
cases than in others ; but I hold to a modest preference 
for skirts, however brief, in the sea-gear of ladies. 
Without them there may sometimes be the effect of 
beauty, and sometimes the effect of barrel. 

For the convenience and safety of the bathers there 
were, even in the last half of September, some twenty 
machines, and half as many bath-men and bath-wom- 
en, who waded into the water and watched that the 
bathers came to no harm, instead of a solitary life- 
guard showing his statuesque shape as he paced the 
shore beside the life-lines, or cynically rocked in his 
boat beyond the breakers, as the custom is on Long 
Island. Here there is no need of life-lines, and, unless 
one held his head resolutely under water, I do not see 
how he could drown within quarter of a mile of the 
shore. Perhaps it is to prevent suicide that the bath- 
men are so plentifully provided. 

96 



LAST DAYS IN A DUTCH HOTEL 

They are a provision of the hotel, I believe, which 
does not relax itself in any essential towards its guests 
as they grow fewer. It seems, on the contrary, to 
use them with a more tender care, and to console them 
as it may for the inevitable parting near at hand. 
Now, within three or four days of the end, the kitchen 
is as scrupulously and vigilantly perfect as it could 
be in the height of the season; and our dwindling 
numbers sit down every night to a dinner that we 
could not get for much more love or vastly more money 
in the month of August, at any shore hotel in Amer- 
ica. It is true that there are certain changes going 
on, but they are going on delicately, almost silently. 
A strip of carpeting has come up from along our cor- 
ridor, but we hardly miss it from the matting which 
remains. Through the open doors of vacant cham- 
bers we can see that beds are coming down, and the 
dismantling extends into the halls at places. Certain 
decorative carved chairs which repeated themselves 
outside the doors have ceased to be there ; but the pict- 
ures still hang on the walls, and within our own rooms 
everything is as conscientious as in midsummer. The 
service is instant, and, if there is some change jn it, 
the change is not for the worse. Yesterday our waiter 
bade me good-bye, and when I said I was sorry he was 
going he alleged a boil on his cheek in excuse ; he would 
not allow that his going had anything to do with the 
closing of the hotel, and he was promptly replaced by 
another who speaks excellent English. Now that the 
first is gone, I may own that he seemed not to speak 
any foreign language long, but, when cornered in 
English, took refuge in French, and then fled from 
pursuit in that to German, and brought up in final 
Dutch, where he was practically inaccessible. 

The elevator runs regularly, if not rapidly; the pa- 
pers arrive unfailingly in the reading-room, includ- 
7 97 



LITERATURE AND LIFE 

ing a solitary London Times, which even I do not read, 
perhaps because I have no English-reading rival to 
contend for it with. Till yesterday, an English artist 
sometimes got it; but he then instantly offered it to 
me; and I had to refuse it because I would not be out- 
done in politeness. Now even he is gone, and on all 
sides I find myself in an unbroken circle of Dutch and 
German, where no one would dispute the Times with 
me if he could. 

Every night the corridors are fully lighted, and 
some mornings swept, while the washing that goes 
on all over Holland, night and morning, does not al- 
ways spare our unfrequented halls and stairs. I note 
these little facts, for the contrast with those of an Amer- 
ican hotel which we once assisted in closing, and where 
the elevator stopped two weeks before we left, and we 
fell from electricity to naphtha-gas, and even this died 
out before us except at long intervals in the passages ; 
while there were lightning changes in the service, and 
a final failure of it till we had to go down and get our 
own ice-water of the lingering room-clerk, after the last 
bell-boy had winked out. 

n 

But in Europe everything is permanent, and in Amer- 
ica everything is provisional. This is the great dis- 
tinction which, if always kept in mind, will save a great 
deal of idle astonishment. It is in nothing more appar- 
ent than in the preparation here at Scheveningen for 
centuries of summer visitors, while at our Long Island 
hotel there was a losing bet on a scant generation of 
them. When it seemed likely that it might be a win- 
ning bet the sand was planked there in front of the 
hotel to the sea with spruce boards. It was very hand- 
somely planked, but it was never afterwards touched, 

98 



LAST DAYS IN A DUTCH HOTEL 

apparently, for any manner of repairs. Here, for 
half a mile the dune on which the hotel stands is shored 
up with massive masonry, and bricked for carriages, 
and tiled for foot-passengers ; and it is all kept as clean 
as if wheel or foot had never passed over it. I am sure 
that there is not a broken brick or a broken tile in the 
whole length or breadth of it. But the hotel here is 
not a bet; it is a business. It has come to stay; and 
on Long Island it had come to see how it would like it. 

Beyond the walk and drive, however, the dunes are 
left to the winds, and to the vegetation with which the 
Dutch planting clothes them against the winds. First 
a coarse grass or rush is sown; then a finer herbage 
comes; then a tough brushwood, with flowers and 
blackberry- vines ; so that while the seaward slopes 
of the dunes are somewhat patched and tattered, the 
landward side and all the pleasant hollows between 
are fairly held against such gales as on Long Island 
blow the lower dunes hither and yon. The sheep 
graze in the valleys at some points; in many a 
little pocket of the dunes I found a potato -patch of 
about the bigness of a city lot, and on week-days I 
saw wooden-shod men slowly, slowly gathering in 
the crop. On Sundays I saw the pleasant nooks and 
corners of these sandy hillocks devoted, as the dunes 
of Long Island were, to whispering lovers, who are 
here as freely and fearlessly affectionate as at home. 
Rocking there is not, and cannot be, in the nature of 
things, as there used to be at Mount Desert ; but what 
is called Twoing at York Harbor is perfectly practicable. 

It is practicable not only in the nooks and corners of 
the dunes, but on discreeter terms in those hooded wil- 
low chairs, so characteristic of the Dutch sea -side. 
These, if faced in pairs towards each other, must be as 
favorable to the exchange of vows as of opinions, and 
if the crowd is ever very great, perhaps one chair could 
LoFC. 99 



LITERATURE AND LIFE 

be made to hold two persons. It was distinctly a pang, 
the other day, to see men carrying them up from the 
beach, and putting them away to hibernate in the base- 
ment of the hotel. Not all, but most of them, were 
taken; though I dare say that on fine days through- 
out October they will go trooping back to the sands 
on the heads of the same men, like a procession of mon- 
strous, two-legged crabs. Such a day was last Sun- 
day, and then the beach offered a lively image of its 
summer gayety. It was dotted with hundreds of 
hooded chairs, which foregathered in gossiping groups 
or confidential couples; and as the sun shone quite 
warm the flaps of the little tents next the dunes were 
let down against it, and ladies in summer white saved 
themselves from sunstroke in their shelter. The 
wooden booths for the sale of candies and mineral 
waters, and beer and sandwiches, were flushed with a 
sudden prosperity, so that when I went to buy my 
pound of grapes from the good woman who under- 
stands my Dutch, I dreaded an indifference in her 
which by no means appeared. She welcomed me as 
warmly as if I had been her sole customer, and did 
not put up the price on me ; perhaps because it was al- 
ready so very high that her imagination could not rise 
above it. 

in 

The hotel showed the same admirable constancy. 
The restaurant was thronged with new-comers, who 
spread out even over the many-tabled esplanade be- 
fore it ; but it was in no wise demoralized. That night 
we sat down in multiplied numbers to a table d'hote 
of serenely unconscious perfection ; and we perma- 
nent guests — alas! we are now becoming transient, 
too — were used with unfaltering recognition of our 
superior worth. We shared the respect which, all over 

ioo 



LAST DAYS IN A DUTCH HOTEL 

Europe, attaches to establishment, and which some- 
times makes us poor Americans wish for a hereditary 
nobility, so that we could all mirror our ancestral value 
in the deference of our inferiors. Where we should 
get our inferiors is another thing, but I suppose we 
could import them for the purpose, if the duties were 
not too great under our tariff. 

We have not yet imported the idea of a European 
hotel in any respect, though we long ago imported 
what we call the European plan. No travelled Amer- 
ican knows it in the extortionate prices of rooms when 
he gets home, or the preposterous charges of our restau- 
rants, where one portion of roast beef swimming in a 
lake of lukewarm juice costs as much as a diversi- 
fied and delicate dinner in Germany or Holland. But 
even if there were any proportion in these things the 
European hotel will not be with us till we have the 
European portier, who is its spring and inspiration. 
He must not, dear home-keeping reader, be at all im- 
agined in the moral or material figure of our hotel 
porter, who appears always in his shirt - sleeves, and 
speaks with the accent of Cork or of Congo. The Eu- 
ropean portier wears a uniform, I do not know why, 
and a gold-banded cap, and he inhabits a little office 
at the entrance of the hotel. He speaks eight or ten 
languages, up to certain limit, rather better than peo- 
ple born to them, and his presence commands an 
instant reverence softening to affection under his uni- 
versal helpfulness. There is nothing he cannot tell 
you, cannot do for you; and you may trust yourself 
implicitly to him. He has the priceless gift of making 
each nationality, each personality, believe that he is 
devoted to its service alone. He turns lightly from 
one language to another, as if he had each under his 
tongue, and he answers simultaneously a fussy French 
woman, an angry English tourist, a stiff Prussian 

101 



LITERATURE AND LIFE 

major, and a thin-voiced American girl in behalf of a 
timorous mother, and he never mixes the replies. He 
is an inexhaustible bottle of dialects; but this is the 
least of his merits, of his miracles. 

Our portier here is a tall, slim Dutchman (most 
Dutchmen are tall and slim), and in spite of the wan- 
ing season he treats me as if I were multitude, while 
at the same time he uses me with the distinction due 
the last of his guests. Twenty times in as many 
hours he wishes me good-day, putting his hand to his 
cap for the purpose; and to oblige me he wears silver 
braid instead of gilt on his cap and coat. I apologized 
yesterday for troubling him so often for stamps, and 
said that I supposed he was much more bothered in 
the season. 

"Between the first of August and the fifteenth," 
he answered, "you cannot think. All that you can 
do is to say, Yes, No; Yes, No." And he left me to 
imagine his responsibilities. 

I am sure he will hold out to the end, and will smile 
me a friendly farewell from the door of his office, which 
is also his dining-room, as I know from often disturb- 
ing him at his meals there. I have no fear of the wait- 
ers either, or of the little errand-boys who wear suits 
of sailor blue, and touch their foreheads when they 
bring you your letters like so many ancient sea-dogs. 
I do not know why the elevator-boy prefers a suit of 
snuff-color; but I know that he will salute us as we 
step out of his elevator for the last time as unfalteringly 
as if we had just arrived at the beginning of the sum- 
mer. 

IV 

It is our last day in the hotel at Scheveningen, and 
I will try to recall in their pathetic order the events of 
the final week. 

102 



LAST DAYS IN A DUTCH HOTEL 

Nothing has been stranger throughout than the 
fluctuation of the guests. At times they have dwin- 
dled to so small a number that one must reckon chief- 
ly upon their quality for consolation; at other times 
they swelled to such a tide as to overflow the table, 
long or short, at dinner, and eddy round a second 
board beside it. There have been nights when I have 
walked down the long corridor to my seaward room 
through a harking solitude of empty chambers; there 
have been mornings when I have come out to break- 
fast past door-mats cheerful with boots of both sexes, 
and door-post hooks where dangling coats and trousers 
peopled the place with a lively if a somewhat flaccid 
semblance of human presence. The worst was that, 
when some one went, we lost a friend, and when some 
one came we only won a stranger. 

Among the first to go were the kindly English folk 
whose acquaintance we made across the table the first 
night, and who took with them so large a share of 
our facile affections that we quite forgot the ances- 
tral enmities, and grieved for them as much as if they 
had been Americans. There have been, in fact, no 
Americans here but ourselves, and we have done what 
we could with the Germans who spoke English. The 

nicest of these were a charming family from F , 

father and mother, and son and daughter, with whom 
we had a pleasant week of dinners. At the very first 
we disagreed with the parents so amicably about Ibsen 
and Sudermann that I was almost sorry to have the 
son take our modern side of the controversy and de- 
clare himself an admirer of those authors with us. 
Our frank literary difference established a kindness 
between us that was strengthened by our community 
of English, and when they went they left us to the 
sympathy of another German family with whom we 
had mainly our humanity in common. They spoke 

103 



LITERATURE AND LIFE 

no English, and I only a German which they must 
have understood with their hearts rather than their 
heads, since it consisted chiefly of good-will. But 
in the air of their sweet natures it flourished surpris- 
ingly, and sufficed each day for praise of the weather 
after it began to be fine, and at parting for some fond 
regrets, not unmixed with philosophical reflections, 
sadly perplexed in the genders and the order of the 
verbs : with me the verb will seldom wait, as it should 
in German, to the end. Both of these families, very 
different in social tradition, I fancied, were one in the 
amiability which makes the alien forgive so much 
militarism to the German nation, and hope for its final 
escape from the drill-sergeant. When they went, we 
were left for some meals to our own American tongue, 
with a brief interval of that English painter and his 
wife with whom we spoke our language as nearly like 
English as we could. Then followed a desperate lunch 
and dinner where an unbroken forest of German, and 
a still more impenetrable morass of Dutch, hemmed us 
in. But last night it was our joy to be addressed in 
our own speech by a lady who spoke it as admirably as 

our dear friends from F . She was Dutch, and when 

she found we were Americans she praised our histo- 
rian Motley, and told us how his portrait is gratefully 
honored with a place in the Queen's palace, The House 
in the Woods, near Scheveningen. 



She had come up from her place in the country, 
four hours away, for the last of the concerts here, which 
have been given throughout the summer by the best 
orchestra in Europe, and which have been thronged 
every afternoon and evening by people from The Hague. 

104 



LAST DAYS IN A DUTCH HOTEL 

One honored day this week even the Queen and the 
Queen Mother came down to the concert, and gave 
us incomparably the greatest event of our waning 
season. I had noticed all the morning a floral per- 
turbation about the main entrance of the hotel, which 
settled into the form of banks of autumnal bloom on 
either side of the specially carpeted stairs, and put 
forth on the roof of the arcade in a crown, much bigger 
round than a barrel, of orange-colored asters, in honor 
of the Queen's ancestral house of Orange. Flags of 
blue, white, and red fluttered nervously about in the 
breeze from the sea, and imparted to us an agreeable 
anxiety not to miss seeing the Queens, as the Dutch 
succinctly call their sovereign and her parent ; and at 
three o'clock we saw them drive up to the hotel. Cer- 
tain officials in civil dress stood at the door of the con- 
cert-room to usher the Queens in, and a bareheaded, 
bald-headed dignity of military figure backed up the 
stairs before them. I would not rashly commit my- 
self to particulars concerning their dress, but 1 am 
sure that the elder Queen wore black, and the younger 
white. The mother has one of the best and wisest 
faces I have seen any woman wear (and most of the 
good, wise faces in this imperfectly balanced world 
are women's) and the daughter one of the sweetest 
and prettiest. Pretty is the word for her face, and 
it showed pink through her blond veil, as she smiled 
and bowed right and left; her features are small and 
fine, and she is not above the middle height. 

As soon as she had passed into the concert-room, 
we who had waited to see her go in ran round to an- 
other door and joined the two or three thousand peo- 
ple who were standing to receive the Queens. These 
had already mounted to the royal box, and they stood 
there while the orchestra played one of the Dutch na- 
tional airs. (One air is not enough for the Dutch; 

105 



LITERATURE AND LIFE 

they must have two.) Then the mother faded some- 
where into the background, and the daughter sat 
alone in the front, on a gilt throne, with a gilt crown 
at top, and a very uncomfortable carved Gothic back. 
She looked so young, so gentle, and so good that the 
rudest Republican could not have helped wishing 
her well out of a position so essentially and irrepara- 
bly false as a hereditary sovereign's. One forgot in 
the presence of her innocent seventeen years that most 
of the ruling princes of the world had left it the worse 
for their having been in it ; at moments one forgot her 
altogether as a princess, and saw her only as a charm- 
ing young girl, who had to sit up rather stiffly. 

At the end of the programme the Queens rose and 
walked slowly out, while the orchestra played the 
other national air. 

VI 

I call them the Queens, because the Dutch do; and 
I like Holland so much that I should hate to differ 
with the Dutch in anything. But, as a matter of fact, 
they are neither of them quite Queens; the mother is 
the regent and the daughter will not be crowned till 
next year. 

But, such as they are, they imparted a supreme 
emotion to our dying season, and thrilled the hotel 
with a fulness of summer life. Since they went, the 
season faintly pulses and respires, so that one can 
just say that it is still alive. Last Sunday was fine, 
and great crowds came down from The Hague to the 
concert, and spread out on the seaward terrace of the 
hotel, around the little tables which I fancied that 
the waiters had each morning wiped dry of the dew, 
from a mere Dutch desire of cleaning something. The 
hooded chairs covered the beach; the children played 

106 




#k. 



'PRETTY IS THE WORD FOR HER FACE 



LAST DAYS IN A DUTCH HOTEL 

in the edges of the surf and delved in the sand; the 
lovers wandered up into the hollows of the dunes. 

There was only the human life, however. I have 
looked in vain for the crabs, big and little, that swarm 
on the Long Island shore, and there are hardly any 
gulls, even; perhaps because there are no crabs for 
them to eat, if they eat crabs ; I never saw gulls doing 
it, but they must eat something. Dogs there are, of 
course, wherever there are people; but they are part 
of the human life. Dutch dogs are in fact very hu- 
man ; and one I saw yesterday behaved quite as badly 
as a bad boy, with respect to his muzzle. He did not 
like his muzzle, and by dint of turning somersaults 
in the sand he got it off, and went frolicking to his 
master in triumph to show him what he had done. 



VII 

It is now the last day, and the desolation is thicken- 
ing upon our hotel. This morning the door-posts 
up and down my corridor showed not a single pair of 
trousers; not a pair of boots flattered the lonely door- 
mats. In the lower hall I found the tables of the great 
dining-room assembled, and the chairs inverted on 
them with their legs in the air; but decently, deco- 
rously, not with the reckless abandon displayed by 
the chairs in our Long Island hotel for weeks before it 
closed. In the smaller dining-room the table was set 
for lunch as if we were to go on dining there forever; 
in the breakfast - room the service and the provision 
were as perfect as ever. The coffee was good, the 
bread delicious, the butter of an unfaltering sweet- 
ness; and the glaze of wear on the polished dress- 
coats of the waiters as respectable as it could have 
been on the first day of the season. All was correct, 

107 



LITERATURE AND LIFE 

and if of a funereal correctness to me, I am sure this 
effect was purely subjective. 

The little bell-boys in sailor suits (perhaps they 
ought to be spelled bell-buoys) clustered about the 
elevator-boy like so many Roman sentinels at their 
posts; the elevator-boy and his elevator were ready 
to take us up or down at any moment. 

The portier and I ignored together the hour of part- 
ing, which we had definitely ascertained and agreed 
upon, and we exchanged some compliments to the 
weather, which is now settled, as if we expected to 
enjoy it long together. I rather dread going in to 
lunch, however, for I fear the empty places. 



VIII 

All is over; we are off. The lunch was an heroic 
effort of the hotel to hide the fact of our separation. 
It was perfect, unless the boiled beef was a confession 
of human weakness; but even this boiled beef was 
exquisite, and the horseradish that went with it was 
so mellowed by art that it checked rather than pro- 
voked the parting tear. The table d'hote had reserved 
a final surprise for us; and when we sat down with 
the fear of nothing but German around us, we heard 
the sound of our own speech from the pleasantest Eng- 
lish pair we had yet encountered; and the travelling 
English are pleasant; I will say it, who am said by 
Sir Walter Besant to be the only American who hates 
their nation. It was really an added pang to go, on 
their account, but the carriage was waiting at the 
door ; the domestique had already carried our baggage 
to the steam -tram station; the kindly menial train 
formed around us for an ultimate douceur, and we 
were off, after the portier had shut us into our vehicle 

108 



LAST DAYS IN A DUTCH HOTEL 

and touched his oft-touched cap for the last time, while 
the hotel facade dissembled its grief by architectural- 
ly smiling in the soft Dutch sun. 

I liked this manner of leaving better than carrying 
part of my own baggage to the train, as I had to do 
on Long Island, though that, too, had its charm; the 
charm of the whole fresh, pungent American life, 
which at this distance is so dear. 



SOME ANOMALIES OF THE SHORT STORY 

THE interesting experiment of one of our great 
publishing houses in putting out serially sev- 
eral volumes of short stories, with the hope that a 
courageous persistence may overcome the popular 
indifference to such collections when severally ad- 
ministered, suggests some questions as to this eldest 
form of fiction which I should like to ask the reader's 
patience with. I do not know that I shall be able to 
answer them, or that 1 shall try to do so; the vitality 
of a question that is answered seems to exhale in the 
event; it palpitates no longer; curiosity flutters away 
from the faded flower, which is fit then only to be fold- 
ed away in the hortus siccus of accomplished facts. In 
view of this I may wish merely to state the problems 
and leave them for the reader's solution, or, more amus- 
ingly, for his mystification. 



One of the most amusing questions concerning the 
short story is why a form which is singly so attrac- 
tive that every one likes to read a short story when 
he finds it alone is collectively so repellent as it is said 
to be. Before now I have imagined the case to be 
somewhat the same as that of a number of pleasant 
people who are most acceptable as separate house- 
holders, but who lose caste and cease to be desirable 
acquaintances when gathered into a boarding-house. 

no 



SOME ANOMALIES OF THE SHORT STORY 

Yet the case is not the same quite, for we see that the 
short story where it is ranged with others of its species 
within the covers of a magazine is so welcome that 
the editor thinks his number the more brilliant the 
more short story writers he can call about his board, 
or under the roof of his pension. Here the boarding- 
house analogy breaks, breaks so signally that I was 
lately moved to ask a distinguished editor why a book 
of short stories usually failed and a magazine usu- 
ally succeeded because of them. He answered, gayly, 
that the short stories in most books of them were bad ; 
that where they were good, they went; and he al- 
leged several well-known instances in which books 
of prime short stories had a great vogue. He was 
so handsomely interested in my inquiry that I could 
not well say I thought some of the short stories which 
he had boasted in his last number were indifferent good, 
and yet, as he allowed, had mainly helped sell it. I 
had in mind many books of short stories of the first 
excellence which had failed as decidedly as those others 
had succeeded, for no reason that I could see ; possibly 
there is really no reason in any literary success or fail- 
ure that can be predicted, or applied in another case. 
I could name these books, if it would serve any pur- 
pose, but, in my doubt, I will leave the reader to think 
of them, for I believe that his indolence or intellectual 
reluctance is largely to blame for the failure of good 
books of short stories. He is commonly so averse to 
any imaginative exertion that he finds it a hardship 
to respond to that peculiar demand which a book of 
good short stories makes upon him. He can read one 
good short story in a magazine with refreshment, and 
a pleasant sense of excitement, in the sort of spur it 
gives to his own constructive faculty. But, if this is 
repeated in ten or twenty stories, he becomes fluttered 
and exhausted by the draft upon his energies; where- 
in 



LITERATURE AND LIFE 

as a continuous fiction of the same quantity acts as 
an agreeable sedative. A condition that the short 
story tacitly makes with the reader, through its limi- 
tations, is that he shall subjectively fill in the details 
and carry out the scheme which in its small dimen- 
sions the story can only suggest; and the greater 
number of readers find this too much for their feeble 
powers, while they cannot resist the incitement to at- 
tempt it. 

My theory does not wholly account for the fact (no 
theory wholly accounts for any fact), and I own that 
the same objections would lie from the reader against 
a number of short stories in a magazine. But it may 
be that the effect is not the same in the magazine be- 
cause of the variety in the authorship, and because 
it would be impossibly jolting to read all the short 
stories in a magazine seriatim. On the other hand, 
the identity of authorship gives a continuity of at- 
traction to the short stories in a book which forms 
that exhausting strain upon the imagination of the 
involuntary co-partner. 



II 

Then, what is the solution as to the form of pub- 
lication for short stories, since people do not object to 
them singly but collectively, and not in variety, but 
in identity of authorship? Are they to be printed only 
in the magazines, or are they to be collected in volumes 
combining a variety of authorship? Rather, 1 could 
wish, it might be found feasible to purvey them in 
some pretty shape where each would appeal singly 
to the reader and would not exhaust him in the sub- 
jective after-work required of him. In this event many 
short stories now cramped into undue limits by the 
editorial exigencies of the magazines might expand 

112 



SOME ANOMALIES OF THE SHORT STORY 

to greater length and breadth, and without ceasing 
to be each a short story might not make so heavy a 
demand upon the subliminal forces of the reader. 

If any one were to say that all this was a little fan- 
tastic, I should not contradict him ; but I hope there is 
some reason in it, if reason can help the short story to 
greater favor, for it is a form which I have great pleas- 
ure in as a reader, and pride in as an American. If 
we have not excelled all other moderns in it, we have 
certainly excelled in it; possibly because we are in 
the period of our literary development which corre- 
sponds to that of other peoples when the short story 
pre-eminently flourished among them. But when one 
has said a thing like this, it immediately accuses one 
of loose and inaccurate statement, and requires one 
to refine upon it, either for one's own peace of con- 
science or for one's safety from the thoughtful reader. 
I am not much afraid of that sort of reader, for he is 
very rare, but I do like to know myself what I mean, 
if I mean anything in particular. 

In this instance I am obliged to ask myself whether 
our literary development can be recognized separate- 
ly from that of the whole English-speaking world. I 
think it can, though, as I am always saying Amer- 
ican literature is merely a condition of English litera- 
ture. In some sense every European literature is a 
condition of some other European literature, yet the 
impulse in each eventuates, if it does not originate 
indigenously. A younger literature will choose, by a 
sort of natural selection, some things for assimilation 
from an elder literature, for no more apparent reason 
than it will reject other things, and it will transform 
them in the process so that it will give them the effect 
of indigeneity. The short story among the Italians, 
who called it the novella, and supplied us with the 
name devoted solely among us to fiction of epical mag- 
8 113 



LITERATURE AND LIFE 

nitude, refined indefinitely upon the Greek romance, if 
it derived from that ; it retrenched itself in scope, and 
enlarged itself in the variety of its types. But still 
these remained types, and they remained types with 
the French imitators of the Italian novella. It was not 
till the Spaniards borrowed the form of the novella and 
transplanted it to their racier soil that it began to bear 
character, and to fruit in the richness of their pica- 
resque fiction. When the English borrowed it they 
adapted it, in the metrical tales of Chaucer, to the ge- 
nius of their nation, which was then both poetical and 
humorous. Here it was full of character, too, and more 
and more personality began to enlarge the bounds 
of the conventional types and to imbue fresh ones. 
But in so far as the novella was studied in the Italian 
sources, the French, Spanish, and English literatures 
were conditions of Italian literature as distinctly, 
though, of course, not so thoroughly, as American 
literature is a condition of English literature. Each 
borrower gave a national cast to the thing borrowed, 
and that is what has happened with us, in the full 
measure that our nationality has differenced itself 
from the English. 

Whatever truth there is in all this, and I will con- 
fess that a good deal of it seems to me hardy conject- 
ure, rather favors my position that we are in some 
such period of our literary development as those other 
peoples when the short story flourished among them. 
Or, if I restrict our claim, I may safely claim that they 
abundantly had the novella when they had not the 
novel at all, and we now abundantly have the novella, 
while we have the novel only subordinately and of 
at least no such quantitative importance as the Eng- 
lish, French, Spanish, Norwegians, Russians, and 
some others of our esteemed contemporaries, not to 
name the Italians. We surpass the Germans, who, 

114 



SOME ANOMALIES OF THE SHORT STORY 

like ourselves, have as distinctly excelled in the mod- 
ern novella as they have fallen short in the novel. 
Or, if I may not quite say this, I will make bold to say 
that I can think of many German novelle that I should 
like to read again, but scarcely one German novel; 
and I could honestly say the same of American novelle, 
though not of American novels. 



Ill 

The abeyance, not to say the desuetude, that the 
novella fell into for several centuries is very curious, 
and fully as remarkable as the modern rise of the short 
story. It began to prevail in the dramatic form, for 
a play is a short story put on the stage; it may have 
satisfied in that form the early love of it, and it has 
continued to please in that form; but in its original 
shape it quite vanished, unless we consider the little 
studies and sketches and allegories of the Spectator 
and Tatler and Idler and Rambler and their imita- 
tions on the Continent as guises of the novella. The 
germ of the modern short story may have survived 
in these, or in the metrical form of the novella which 
appeared in Chaucer and never wholly disappeared. 
With Crabbe the novella became as distinctly the short 
story as it has become in the hands of Miss Wilkins. 
But it was not till our time that its great merit as a 
form was felt, for until our time so great work was 
never done with it. I remind myself of Boccaccio, 
and of the Arabian Nights, without the wish to hedge 
from my bold stand. They are all elemental; com- 
pared with some finer modern work which deepens 
inward immeasurably, they are all of their superficial 
limits. They amuse, but they do not hold, the mind 
and stamp it with large and profound impressions. 

An Occidental cannot judge the literary quality 

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LITERATURE AND LIFE 

of the Eastern tales ; but I will own my suspicion that 
the perfection of the Italian work is philological rather 
than artistic, while the web woven by Mr. James or 
Miss Jewett, by Kielland or Bjo'rnson, by Maupas- 
sant, by Palacio Valdes, by Giovanni Verga, by Tour- 
guenief, in one of those little frames seems to me of an 
exquisite color and texture and of an entire literary 
preciousness, not only as regards the diction, but as 
regards those more intangible graces of form, those 
virtues of truth and reality, and those lasting signifi- 
cances which distinguish the masterpiece. 

The novella has in fact been carried so far in the 
short story that it might be asked whether it had not 
left the novel behind, as to perfection of form; though 
one might not like to affirm this. Yet there have been 
but few modern fictions of the novel's dimensions 
which have the beauty of form many a novella em- 
bodies. Is this because it is easier to give form in 
the small than in the large, or only because it is easier 
to hide formlessness? It is easier to give form in the 
novella than in the novel, because the design of less 
scope can be more definite, and because the persons 
and facts are fewer, and each can be more carefully 
treated. But, on the other hand, the slightest error 
in execution shows more in the small than in the large, 
and a fault of conception is more evident. The novella 
must be clearly imagined, above all things, for there 
is no room in it for those felicities of characterization or 
comment by which the artist of faltering design saves 
himself in the novel. 

IV 

The question as to where the short story distin- 
guishes itself from the anecdote is of the same nat- 
ure as that which concerns the bound set between 

116 



SOME ANOMALIES OF THE SHORT STORY 

it and the novel. In both cases the difference of the 
novella is in the motive, or the origination. The 
anecdote is too palpably simple and single to be re- 
garded as a novella, though there is now and then 
a novella like The Father, by Bjornson, which is of 
the actual brevity of the anecdote, but which, when 
released in the reader's consciousness, expands to 
dramatic dimensions impossible to the anecdote. Many 
anecdotes have come down from antiquity, but not, I 
believe, one short story, at least in prose ; and the Ital- 
ians, if they did not invent the story, gave us some- 
thing most sensibly distinguishable from the classic 
anecdote in the novella. The anecdote offers an il- 
lustration of character, or records a moment of action; 
the novella embodies a drama and develops a type. 

It is not quite so clear as to when and where a piece 
of fiction ceases to be a novella and becomes a novel. 
The frontiers are so vague that one is obliged to recog- 
nize a middle species, or rather a middle magnitude, 
which paradoxically, but necessarily enough, we 
call the novelette. First we have the short story, or 
novella, then we have the long story, or novel, and 
between these we have the novelette, which is in name 
a smaller than the short story, though it is in point of 
fact two or three times longer than a short story. We 
may realize them physically if we will adopt the maga- 
zine parlance and speak of the novella as a one-number 
story, of the novel as a serial, and of the novelette as 
a two-number or a three-number story; if it passes 
the three-number limit it seems to become a novel. 
As a two-number or three-number story it is the de- 
spair of editors and publishers. The interest of so 
brief a serial will not mount sufficiently to carry strong- 
ly over from month to month; when the tale is com- 
pleted it will not make a book which the Trade (in- 
exorable force!) cares to handle. It is therefore still 

117 



LITERATURE AND LIFE 

awaiting its authoritative avatar, which it will be some 
one's prosperity and glory to imagine ; for in the novel- 
ette are possibilities for fiction as yet scarcely divined. 

The novelette can have almost as perfect form as 
the novella. In fact, the novel has form in the meas- 
ure that it approaches the novelette; and some of the 
most symmetrical modern novels are scarcely more 
than novelettes, like Tourgueniefs Dmitri Rudine, 
or his Smoke, or Spring Floods. The Vicar of Wake- 
field, the father of the modern novel, is scarcely more 
than a novelette, and I have sometimes fancied, but 
no doubt vainly, that the ultimated novel might be 
of the dimensions of Hamlet. If any one should say 
there was not room in Hamlet for the character and 
incident requisite in a novel, I should be ready to an- 
swer that there seemed a good deal of both in Hamlet. 

But no doubt there are other reasons why the novel 
should not finally be of the length of Hamlet, and I 
must not let my enthusiasm for the novelette carry me 
too far, or, rather, bring me up too short. I am dis- 
posed to dwell upon it, I suppose, because it has not 
yet shared the favor which the novella and the novel 
have enjoyed, and because until somebody invents a 
way for it to the public it cannot prosper like the one- 
number story or the serial. I should like to say as 
my last word for it here that I believe there are many 
novels which, if stripped of their padding, would turn 
out to have been all along merely novelettes in disguise. 

It does not follow, however, that there are many 
novelle which, if they were duly padded, would be 
found novelettes. In that dim, subjective region 
where the aesthetic origins present themselves almost 
with the authority of inspirations there is nothing 
clearer than the difference between the short -story 
motive and the long-story motive. One, if one is in 
that line of work, feels instinctively just the size and 

118 



SOME ANOMALIES OF THE SHORT STORY 

carrying power of the given motive. Or, if the reader 
prefers a different figure, the mind which the seed 
has been dropped into from Somewhere is mystically- 
aware whether the seed is going to grow up a bush 
or is going to grow up a tree, if left to itself. Of course, 
the mind to which the seed is intrusted may play it 
false, and wilfully dwarf the growth, or force it to 
unnatural dimensions; but the critical observer will 
easily detect the fact of such treasons. Almost in the 
first germinal impulse the inventive mind forefeels 
the ultimate difference and recognizes the essential 
simplicity or complexity of the motive. There will 
be a prophetic subdivision into a variety of motives 
and a multiplication of characters and incidents and 
situations; or the original motive will be divined in- 
divisible, and there will be a small group of people 
immediately interested and controlled by a single, or 
predominant, fact. The uninspired may contend that 
this is bosh, and I own that something might be said for 
their contention, but upon the whole I think it is gospel. 
The right novel is never a congeries of novelle, as 
might appear to the uninspired. If it indulges even 
in episodes, it loses in reality and vitality. It is one 
stock from which its various branches put out, and 
form it a living growth identical throughout. The 
right novella is never a novel cropped back from the 
size of a tree to a bush, or the branch of a tree stuck 
into the ground and made to serve for a bush. It is 
another species, destined by the agencies at work in the 
realm of unconsciousness to be brought into being of its 
own kind, and not of another. 



This was always its case, but in the process of time 
the short story, while keeping the natural limits of 

119 



LITERATURE AND LIFE 

the primal novella (if ever there was one), has shown 
almost limitless possibilities within them. It has 
shown itself capable of imparting the effect of every 
sort of intention, whether of humor or pathos, of trag- 
edy or comedy or broad farce or delicate irony, of 
character or action. The thing that first made itself 
known as a little tale, usually salacious, dealing with 
conventionalized types and conventionalized inci- 
dents, has proved itself possibly the most flexible of 
all the literary forms in its adaptation to the needs 
of the mind that wishes to utter itself, inventively or 
constructively, upon some fresh occasion, or wishes 
briefly to criticise or represent some phase or fact of 
life. * 

The riches in this shape of fiction are effectively 
inestimable, if we consider what has been done in the 
short story, and is still doing everywhere. The good 
novels may be easily counted, but the good novelle, 
since Boccaccio began (if it was he that first began) 
to make them, cannot be computed. In quantity they 
are inexhaustible, and in quality they are wonder- 
fully satisfying. Then, why is it that so very, very 
few of the most satisfactory of that innumerable mul- 
titude stay by you, as the country people say, in char- 
acterization or action? How hard it is to recall a 
person or a fact out of any of them, out of the most 
signally good! We seem to be delightfully nourished 
as we read, but is it, after all, a full meal? We become 
of a perfect intimacy and a devoted friendship with 
the men and women in the short stories, but not ap- 
parently of a lasting acquaintance. It is a single 
meeting we have with them, and though we instantly 
love or hate them dearly, recurrence and repetition 
seem necessary to that familiar knowledge in which 
we hold the personages in a novel. 

It is here that the novella, so much more perfect in 

120 



SOME ANOMALIES OF THE SHORT STORY 

form, shows its irremediable inferiority to the novel, 
and somehow to the play, to the very farce, which it 
may quantitatively excel. We can all recall by name 
many characters out of comedies and farces; but how 
many characters out of short stories can we recall? 
Most persons of the drama give themselves away by 
name for types, mere figments of allegory, and per- 
haps oblivion is the penalty that the novella pays 
for the fineness of its characterizations; but perhaps, 
also, the dramatic form has greater facilities for repe- 
tition, and so can stamp its persons more indelibly on 
the imagination than the narrative form in the same 
small space. The narrative must give to description 
what the drama trusts to representation ; but this can- 
not account for the superior permanency of the dra- 
matic types in so great measure as we might at first 
imagine, for they remain as much in mind from read- 
ing as from seeing the plays. It is possible that as 
the novella becomes more conscious, its persons will 
become more memorable; but as it is, though we now 
vividly and with lasting delight remember certain 
short stories, we scarcely remember by name any of 
the people in them. I may be risking too much in 
offering an instance, but who, in even such signal in- 
stances as The Revolt of Mother, by Miss Wilkins, or 
The Dulham Ladies, by Miss Jewett, can recall by 
name the characters that made them delightful? 



VI 

The defect of the novella which we have been ac- 
knowledging seems an essential limitation; but per- 
haps it is not insuperable ; and we may yet have short 
stories which shall supply the delighted imagination 
with creations of as much immortality as we can rea- 

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LITERATURE AND LIFE 

sonably demand. The structural change would not 
be greater than the moral or material change which 
has been wrought in it since it began as a yarn, gross 
and palpable, which the narrator spun out of the 
coarsest and often the filthiest stuff, to snare the thick 
fancy or amuse the lewd leisure of listeners willing 
as children to have the same persons and the same 
things over and over again. Now it has not only 
varied the persons and things, but it has refined and 
verified them in the direction of the natural and the 
supernatural, until it is above all other literary forms 
the vehicle of reality and spirituality. When one 
thinks of a bit of Mr. James's psychology in this form, 
or a bit of Verga's or Kielland's sociology, or a bit of 
Miss Jewett's exquisite veracity, one perceives the im- 
mense distance which the short story has come on the 
way to the height it has reached. It serves equally 
the ideal and the real; that which it is loath to serve 
is the unreal, so that among the short stories which 
have recently made reputations for their authors 
very few are of that peculiar cast which we have no 
name for but romanticistic. The only distinguished 
modern writer of romanticistic novelle whom I can 
think of is Mr. Bret Harte, and he is of a period when 
romanticism was so imperative as to be almost a con- 
dition of fiction. I am never so enamoured of a cause 
that I will not admit facts that seem to tell against it, 
and I will allow that this writer of romanticistic short 
stories has more than any other supplied us with mem- 
orable types and characters. We remember Mr. John 
Oakhurst by name; we remember Kentuck and Ten- 
nessee's Pa tner, at least by nickname; and we re- 
member their several qualities. These figures, if we 
cannot quite consent that they are persons, exist in 
our memories by force of their creator's imagination, 
and at the moment I cannot think of any others that 

122 



SOME ANOMALIES OF THE SHORT STORY 

do, out of the myriad of American short stories, ex- 
cept Rip Van Winkle out of Irving's Legend of Sleepy 
Hollow, and Marjorie Daw out of Mr. Aldrich's fa- 
mous little caprice of that title, and Mr. James's Daisy 
Miller. 

It appears to be the fact that those writers who have 
first distinguished themselves in the novella have 
seldom written novels of prime order. Mr. Kipling is 
an eminent example, but Mr. Kipling has yet a long 
life before him in which to upset any theory about 
him, and one can only instance him provisionally. 
On the other hand, one can be much more confident 
that the best novelle have been written by the greatest 
novelists, conspicuously Maupassant, Verga, Bjorn- 
son, Mr. Thomas Hardy, Mr. James, Mr. Cable, Tour- 
guenief, Tolstoy, Valdes, not to name others. These 
have, in fact, all done work so good in this form that 
one is tempted to call it their best work. It is really 
not their best, but it is work so good that it ought to 
have equal acceptance with their novels, if that dis- 
tinguished editor was right who said that short stories 
sold well when they were good short stories. That 
they ought to do so is so evident that a devoted reader 
of them, to whom I was submitting the anomaly the 
other day, insisted that they did. I could only allege 
the testimony of publishers and authors to the con- 
trary, and this did not satisfy him. 

It does not satisfy me, and I wish that the general 
reader, with whom the fault lies, could be made to say 
why, if he likes one short story by itself and four short 
stories in a magazine, he does not like, or will not have, 
a dozen short stories in a book. This was the baffling 
question which I began with and which I find myself 
forced to end with, after all the light I have thrown 
upon the subject. I leave it where I found it, but per- 
haps that is a good deal for a critic to do. If I had 

123 



LITERATURE AND LIFE 

left it anywhere else the reader might not feel bound 
to deal with it practically by reading all the books of 
short stories he could lay hands on, and either divin- 
ing why he did not enjoy them, or else forever fore- 
going his prejudice against them because of his pleas- 
ure in them. 



A CIRCUS IN THE SUBURBS 

WE dwellers in cities and large towns, if we are 
well-to-do, have more than our fill of pleasures 
of all kinds; and for now many years past we have 
been used to a form of circus where surfeit is nearly 
as great misery as famine in that kind could be. For 
our sins, or some of our friends' sins, perhaps, we have 
now gone so long to circuses of three rings and two 
raised platforms that we scarcely realize that in the 
country there are still circuses of one ring and no plat- 
form at all. We are accustomed, in the gross and 
foolish superfluity of these city circuses, to see no feat 
quite through, but to turn our greedy eyes at the most 
important instant in the hope of greater wonders in 
another ring. We have four or five clowns, in as many 
varieties of grotesque costume, as well as a lady clown 
in befitting dress; but we hear none of them speak, 
not even the lady clown, while in the country circus 
the old clown of our childhood, one and indivisible, 
makes the same style of jokes, if not the very same 
jokes, that we used to hear there. It is not easy to 
believe all this, and I do not know that I should quite 
believe it myself if I had not lately been witness of 
it in the suburban village where I was passing the 
summer. 



The circus announced itself in the good old way 
weeks beforehand by the vast posters of former days 
and by a profusion of small bills which fell upon the 

125 



LITERATURE AND LIFE 

village as from the clouds, and left it littered every- 
where with their festive pink. They prophesied it in 
a name borne by the first circus I ever saw, which was 
also an animal show, but the animals must all have 
died during the fifty years past, for there is now no 
menagerie attached to it. I did not know this when 
I heard the band braying through the streets of the 
village on the morning of the performance, and for 
me the mangy old camels and the pimpled elephants 
of yore led the procession through accompanying 
ranks of boys who have mostly been in their graves 
for half a lifetime; the distracted ostrich thrust an 
advertising neck through the top of its cage, and the 
lion roared to himself in the darkness of his moving 
prison. I felt the old thrill of excitement, the vain 
hope of something preternatural and impossible, and 
I do not know what could have kept me from that cir- 
cus as soon as I had done lunch. My heart rose at 
sight of the large tent (which was yet so very little in 
comparison with the tents of the three-ring and two- 
platform circuses); the alluring and illusory side- 
shows of fat women and lean men ; the horses tethered 
in the background and stamping under the fly-bites; 
the old, weather - beaten grand chariot, which looked 
like the ghost of the grand chariot which used to drag 
me captive in its triumph; and the canvas shelters 
where the cooks were already at work over their ket- 
tles on the evening meal of the circus folk. 

I expected to be kept a long while from the ticket- 
wagon by the crowd, but there was no crowd, and per- 
haps there never used to be much of a crowd. I bought 
my admittances without a moment's delay, and the 
man who sold me my reserve seats had even leisure 
to call me back and ask to look at the change he had 
given me, mostly nickels. "I thought I didn't give 
you enough/' he said, and he added one more, and 

126 



A CIRCUS IN THE SUBURBS 

sent me on to the doorkeeper with my faith in human 
nature confirmed and refreshed. 

It was cool enough outside, but within it was very- 
warm, as it should be, to give the men with palm-leaf 
fans and ice-cold lemonade a chance. They were 
already making their rounds, and crying their wares 
with voices from the tombs of the dead past; and the 
child of the young mother who took my seat-ticket 
from me was going to sleep at full length on the lower- 
most tread of the benches, so that I had to step across 
its prostrate form. These reserved seats were car- 
peted; but I had forgotten how little one rank was 
raised above another, and how very trying they were 
upon the back and legs. But for the carpeting, I 
could not see how I was advantaged above the com- 
moner folk in the unreserved seats, and I reflected how 
often in this world we paid for an inappreciable splen- 
dor. I could not see but they were as well off as I; 
they were much more gayly dressed, and some of them 
were even smoking cigars, while they were nearly all 
younger by ten, twenty, forty, or fifty years, and even 
more. They did not look like the country people whom 
I rather hoped and expected to see, but were appar- 
ently my fellow-villagers, in different stages of ex- 
citement. They manifested by the usual signs their 
impatience to have the performance begin, and I con- 
fess that I shared this, though I did not take part in 
the demonstration. 

II 

I have no intention of following the events seriatim. 
From time to time during their progress I renewed 
my old one-sided acquaintance with the circus- men. 
They were quite the same people, I believe, but strange- 
ly softened and ameliorated, as I hope I am, and look- 
ing not a day older, which I cannot say of myself, 

127 



LITERATURE AND LIFE 

exactly. The supernumeraries were patently farmer 
boys who had entered newly upon that life in a spirit 
of adventure, and who wore their partial liveries, a 
braided coat here and a pair of striped trousers there, 
with a sort of timorous pride, a deprecating bravado, 
as if they expected to be hooted by the spectators and 
were very glad when they were not. The man who 
went round with a dog to keep boys from hooking in 
under the curtain had grown gentler, and his dog did 
not look as if he would bite the worst boy in town. 
The man came up and asked the young mother about 
her sleeping child, and I inferred that the child had 
been sick, and was therefore unusually interesting 
to all the great, kind-hearted, simple circus family. 
He was good to the poor supes, and instructed them, 
not at all sneeringly, how best to manage the guy- 
ropes for the nets when the trapeze events began. 

There was, in fact, an air of pleasing domesticity 
diffused over the whole circus. This was, perhaps, 
partly an effect from our extreme proximity to its per- 
formances; I had never been on quite such intimate 
terms with equitation and aerostation of all kinds; 
but I think it was also largely from the good hearts 
of the whole company. A circus must become, dur- 
ing the season, a great brotherhood and sisterhood, 
especially sisterhood, and its members must forget 
finally that they are not united by ties of blood. I 
dare say they often become so, as husbands and wives 
and fathers and mothers, if not as brothers. 

The domestic effect was heightened almost poig- 
nantly when a young lady in a Turkish - towel bath- 
gown came out and stood close by the band, waiting 
for her act on a barebacked horse of a conventional 
pattern. She really looked like a young goddess in 
a Turkish - towel bath -gown: goddesses must have 
worn bath-gowns, especially Venus, who was often 

128 



A CIRCUS IN THE SUBURBS 

imagined in the bath, or just out of it. But when this 
goddess threw off her bath-gown, and came bound- 
ing into the ring as gracefully as the clogs she wore 
on her slippers would let her, she was much more mod- 
estly dressed than most goddesses. What I am trying 
to say, however, is that, while she stood there by the 
band, she no more interested the musicians than if 
she were their collective sister. They were all in their 
shirt - sleeves for the sake of the coolness, and they 
banged and trumpeted and fluted away as indifferent 
to her as so many born brothers. 

Indeed, when the gyrations of her horse brought 
her to our side of the ring, she was visibly not so youth- 
ful and not so divine as she might have been; but 
the girl who did the trapeze acts, and did them won- 
derfully, left nothing to be desired in that regard; 
though really I do not see why we who have neither 
youth nor beauty should always expect it of other 
people. I think it would have been quite enough for 
her to do the trapeze acts so perfectly; but her being 
so pretty certainly added a poignancy to the contem- 
plation of her perils. One could follow every motion 
of her anxiety in that close proximity: the tremor of 
her chin as she bit her lips before taking her flight 
through the air, the straining eagerness of her eye as 
she measured the distance, the frown with which she 
forbade herself any shrinking or reluctance. 



Ill 

How strange is life, how sad and perplexing its 
contradictions! Why should such an exhibition as 
that be supposed to give pleasure? Perhaps it does 
not give pleasure, but is only a necessary fulfilment 
of one of the many delusions we are in with regard to 
each other in this bewildering world. They are of 

9 129 



LITERATURE AND LIFE 

all sorts and degrees, these delusions, and I suppose 
that in the last analysis it was not pleasure I got from 
the clown and his clowning, clowned he ever so mer- 
rily. I remember that I liked hearing his old jokes, 
not because they were jokes, but because they were old 
and endeared by long association. He sang one song 
which I must have heard him sing at my first circus 
(I am sure it was he), about " Things that I don't like 
to see," and I heartily agreed with him that his book 
of songs, which he sent round to be sold, was fully 
worth the half -dime asked for it, though I did not buy it. 
Perhaps the rival author in me withheld me, but, 
as a brother man, I will not allow that I did not feel 
for him and suffer with him because of the thick, 
white pigment which plentifully coated his face, and, 
with the sweat drops upon it, made me think of a 
newly painted wall in the rain. He was infinitely 
older than his personality, than his oldest joke (though 
you never can be sure how old a joke is), and, repre- 
sentatively, I dare say he outdated the pyramids. They 
must have made clowns whiten their faces in the dawn 
of time, and no doubt there were drolls among the 
antediluvians who enhanced the effect of their fun by 
that means. All the same, I pitied this clown for it, 
and I fancied in his wildest waggery the note of a 
real irascibility. Shall I say that he seemed the only 
member of that little circus who was not of an ami- 
able temper? But I do not blame him, and I think 
it much to have seen a clown once more who jested 
audibly with the ringmaster and always got the better 
of him in repartee. It was long since I had known that 
pleasure. 

IV 

Throughout the performance at this circus I was 
troubled by a curious question, whether it were really 

130 



A CIRCUS IN THE SUBURBS 

of the same moral and material grandeur as the cir- 
cuses it brought to memory, or whether these were 
thin and slight, too. We all know how the places of 
our childhood, the heights, the distances, shrink and 
dwindle when we go back to them, and was it possible 
that I had been deceived in the splendor of my early 
circuses? The doubt was painful, but I was forced 
to own that there might be more truth in it than in a 
blind fealty to their remembered magnificence. Very 
likely circuses have grown not only in size, but in the 
richness and variety of their entertainments, and I 
was spoiled for the simple joys of this. But I could 
see no reflection of my dissatisfaction on the young 
faces around me, and I must confess that there was 
at least so much of the circus that I left when it was 
half over. I meant to go into the side-shows and see 
the fat woman and the living skeleton, and take the 
giant by the hand and the armless man by his friendly 
foot, if I might be so honored. But I did none of these 
things, and I am willing to believe the fault was in 
me, if I was disappointed in the circus. It was I who 
had shrunk and dwindled, and not it. To real boys it 
was still the size of the firmament, and was a world 
of wonders and delights. At least I can recognize 
this fact now, and can rejoice in the peaceful progress 
all over the country of the simple circuses which the 
towns never see, but which help to render the summer 
fairer and brighter to the unspoiled eyes and hearts 
they appeal to. I hope it will be long before they cease 
to find profit in the pleasure they give. 



A SHE HAMLET 

THE other night as I sat before the curtain of the 
Garden Theatre and waited for it to rise upon 
the Hamlet of Mme. Bernhardt, a thrill of the rich ex- 
pectation which cannot fail to precede the rise of any 
curtain upon any Hamlet passed through my eager 
frame. There is, indeed, no scene of drama which 
is of a finer horror (eighteenth-century horror) than 
that which opens the great tragedy. The sentry 
pacing up and down upon the platform at Elsinore 
under the winter night; the greeting between him 
and the comrade arriving to relieve him, with its hints 
of the bitter cold; the entrance of Horatio and Mar- 
cellus to these before they can part; the mention of 
the ghost, and, while the soldiers are in the act of pro- 
testing it a veridical phantom, the apparition of the 
ghost, taking the word from their lips and hushing 
all into a pulseless awe: what could be more sim- 
ply and sublimely real, more naturally supernatural? 
What promise of high mystical things to come there 
is in the mere syllabling of the noble verse, and how 
it enlarges us from ourselves, for that time at least, 
to a disembodied unity with the troubled soul whose 
martyry seems foreboded in the solemn accents! As 
the many Hamlets on which the curtain had risen in 
my time passed in long procession through my mem- 
ory, I seemed to myself so much of their world, and so 
little of the world that arrogantly calls itself the actual 
one, that I should hardly have been surprised to find 

132 



A SHE HAMLET 

myself one of the less considered persons of the drama 
who were seen but not heard in its course. 



The trouble in judging anything is that if you have 
the materials for an intelligent criticism, the case is 
already prejudiced in your hands. You do not bring 
a free mind to it, and all your efforts to free your mind 
are a species of gymnastics more or less admirable, 
but not really effective for the purpose. The best 
way is to own yourself unfair at the start, and then 
you can have some hope of doing yourself justice, 
if not your subject. In other words, if you went to 
see the Hamlet of Mme. Bernhardt frankly expecting 
to be disappointed, you were less likely in the end to 
be disappointed in your expectations, and you could 
not blame her if you were. To be ideally fair to that 
representation, it would be better not to have known 
any other Hamlet, and, above all, the Hamlet of Shake- 
speare. 

From the first it was evident that she had three 
things overwhelmingly against her — her sex, her race, 
and her speech. You never ceased to feel for a mo- 
ment that it was a woman who was doing that melan- 
choly Dane, and that the woman was a Jewess, and 
the Jewess a French Jewess. These three removes 
put a gulf impassable between her utmost skill and 
the impassioned irresolution of that inscrutable North- 
ern nature which is in nothing so masculine as its 
feminine reluctances and hesitations, or so little French 
as in those obscure emotions which the English poetry 
expressed with more than Gallic clearness, but which 
the French words always failed to convey. The battle 
was lost from the first, and all you could feel about 

133 



LITERATURE AND LIFE 

it for the rest was that if it was magnificent it was 
not war. 

While the battle went on I was the more anxious 
to be fair, because I had, as it were, pre-espoused the 
winning side ; and I welcomed, in the interest of criti- 
cal impartiality, another Hamlet which came to mind, 
through readily traceable associations. This was a 
Hamlet also of French extraction in the skill and 
school of the actor, but as much more deeply derived 
than the Hamlet of Mme. Bernhardt as the large im- 
agination of Charles Fechter transcended in its virile 
range the effect of her subtlest womanish intuition. 
His was the first blond Hamlet known to our stage, 
and hers was also blond, if a reddish-yellow wig may 
stand for a complexion ; and it was of the quality of 
his Hamlet in masterly technique. 



II 

The Hamlet of Fechter, which rose ghostlike out 
of the gulf of the past, and cloudily possessed the stage 
where the Hamlet of Mme. Bernhardt was figuring, 
was called a romantic Hamlet thirty years ago; and 
so it was in being a break from the classic Hamlets of 
the Anglo-American theatre. It was romantic as 
Shakespeare himself was romantic, in an elder sense 
of the word, and not romanticistic as Dumas was ro- 
manticistic. It was, therefore, the most realistic Ham- 
let ever yet seen, because the most naturally poetic. 
Mme. Bernhardt recalled it by the perfection of her 
school; for Fechter's poetic naturalness differed from 
the conventionality of the accepted Hamlets in nothing 
so much as the superiority of its self-instruction. In 
Mme. Bernhardt's Hamlet, as in his, nothing was 
trusted to chance, or "inspiration." Good or bad, 

134 




"YOU NEVER CEASED TO FEEL . . . THAT IT WAS A 
WOMAN WHO WAS DOING THAT MELANCHOLY DANE " 



A SHE HAMLET 

what one saw was what was meant to be seen. When 
Fechter played Edmond Dantes or Claude Melnotte, 
he put reality into those preposterous inventions, and 
in Hamlet even his alien accent helped him vitalize 
the part ; it might be held to be nearer the Elizabethan 
accent than ours, and after all, you said, Hamlet was 
a foreigner, and in your high content with what he gave 
you did not mind its being in a broken vessel. When 
he challenged the ghost with " I call thee keeng, father, 
rawl-Dane," you would hardly have had the erring 
utterance bettered. It sufficed as it was; and when 
he said to Rosencrantz, "Will you pleh upon this 
pyip?" it was with such a princely authority and com- 
radely entreaty that you made no note of the slips in 
the vowels except to have pleasure of their quaintness 
afterwards. For the most part you were not aware of 
these bewrayals of his speech; and in certain high 
things it was soul interpreted to soul through the poetry 
of Shakespeare so finely, so directly, that there was 
scarcely a sense of the histrionic means. 

He put such divine despair into the words, "Ex- 
cept my life, except my life, except my lifer' following 
the mockery with which he had assured Polonius there 
was nothing he would more willingly part withal than 
his leave, that the heart-break of them had lingered 
with me for thirty years, and I had been alert for them 
with every Hamlet since. But before I knew, Mme. 
Bernhardt had uttered them with no effect whatever. 
Her Hamlet, indeed, cut many of the things that we 
have learned to think the points of Hamlet, and it so 
transformed others by its interpretation of the trans- 
lator's interpretation of Shakespeare that they passed 
unrecognized. Soliloquies are the weak invention 
of the enemy, for the most part, but as such things 
go that soliloquy of Hamlet's, "To be or not to be," 
is at least very noble poetry ; and yet Mme. Bernhardt 

135. 



LITERATURE AND LIFE 

was so unimpressive in it that you scarcely noticed 
the act of its delivery. Perhaps this happened be- 
cause the sumptuous and sombre melancholy of Shake- 
speare's thought was transmitted in phrases that re- 
fused it its proper mystery. But there was always a 
hardness, not always from the translation, upon this 
feminine Hamlet. It was like a thick shell with no 
crevice in it through which the tenderness of Shake- 
speare's Hamlet could show, except for the one mo- 
ment at Ophelia's grave, where he reproaches Laertes 
with those pathetic words : 

" What is the reason that you use me thus ? 
I loved you ever; but it is no matter." 

Here Mme. Bernhardt betrayed a real grief, but as 
a woman would, and not a man. At the close of the 
Gonzago play, when Hamlet triumphs in a mad whirl, 
her Hamlet hopped up and down like a mischievous 
crow, a mischievous she-crow. 

There was no repose in her Hamlet, though there 
were moments of leaden lapse which suggested phys- 
ical exhaustion; and there was no range in her elo- 
cution expressive of the large vibration of that tor- 
mented spirit. Her voice dropped out, or jerked itself 
out, and in the crises of strong emotion it was the voice 
of a scolding or a hysterical woman. At times her 
movements, which she must have studied so hard to 
master, were drolly womanish, especially those of the 
whole person. Her quickened pace was a woman's 
nervous little run, and not a man's swift stride; and 
to give herself due stature, it was her foible to wear 
a woman's high heels to her shoes, and she could not 
help tilting on them. 

In the scene with the queen after the play, most 
English and American Hamlets have required her to 
look upon the counterfeit presentment of two brothers 

136 



A SHE HAMLET 

in miniatures something the size of tea - plates ; but 
Mme. Bernhardt 's preferred full-length, life-size fam- 
ily portraits. The dead king's effigy did not appear 
a flattered likeness in the scene-painter's art, but it 
was useful in disclosing his ghost by giving place to 
it in the wall at the right moment. She achieved a 
novelty by this treatment of the portraits, and she 
achieved a novelty in the tone she took with the wretch- 
ed queen. Hamlet appeared to scold her mother, 
but though it could be said that her mother deserved 
a scolding, was it the part of a good daughter to give 
it her? 

One should, of course, say a good son, but long be- 
fore this it had become impossible to think at all of 
Mme. Bernhardt's Hamlet as a man, if it ever had been 
possible. She had traversed the bounds which tra- 
dition as well as nature has set, and violated the only 
condition upon which an actress may personate a 
man. This condition is that there shall be always a 
hint of comedy in the part, that the spectator shall 
know all the time that the actress is a woman, and 
that she shall confess herself such before the play is 
over; she shall be fascinating in the guise of a man 
only because she is so much more intensely a woman in 
in it. Shakespeare had rather a fancy for women in 
men's roles, which, as women's roles in his time were 
always taken by pretty and clever boys, could be more 
naturally managed then than now. But when it came 
to the eclaircissement, and the pretty boys, who had 
been playing the parts of women disguised as men, 
had to own themselves women, the effect must have 
been confused if not weakened. If Mme. Bernhardt, 
in the necessity of doing something Shakespearean, 
had chosen to do Rosalind, or Viola, or Portia, she 
could have done it with all the modern advantages 
of women in men's r61es. These characters are, of 

J 37 



LITERATURE AND LIFE 

course, " lighter motions bounded in a shallower brain " 
than the creation she aimed at; but she could at least 
have made much of them, and she does not make much 
of Hamlet. 

Ill 

The strongest reason against any woman Hamlet 
is that it does violence to an ideal. Literature is not 
so rich in great imaginary masculine types that we 
can afford to have them transformed to women; and 
after seeing Mme. Bernhardt's Hamlet no one can 
altogether liberate himself from the fancy that the 
Prince of Denmark was a girl of uncertain age, with 
crises of mannishness in which she did not seem quite 
a lady. Hamlet is in nothing more a man than in 
the things to which as a man he found himself un- 
equal ; for as a woman he would have been easily su- 
perior to them. If we could suppose him a woman 
as Mme. Bernhardt, in spite of herself, invites us to 
do, we could only suppose him to have solved his per- 
plexities with the delightful precipitation of his puta- 
tive sex. As the niece of a wicked uncle, who in that 
case would have had to be a wicked aunt, wedded to 
Hamlet's father hard upon the murder of her mother, 
she would have made short work of her vengeance. 
No fine scruples would have delayed her; she would 
not have had a moment's question whether she had 
not better kill herself; she would have out with her 
bare bodkin and ended the doubt by first passing it 
through her aunt's breast. 

To be sure, there would then have been no play of 
" Hamlet," as we have it; but a Hamlet like that imag- 
ined, a frankly feminine Hamlet, Mme. Bernhardt could 
have rendered wonderfully. It is in attempting a mas- 
culine Hamlet that she transcends the imaginable and 

138 



A SHE HAMLET 

violates an ideal. It is not thinkable. After you have 
seen it done, you say, as Mr. Clemens is said to have 
said of bicycling : " Yes, I have seen it, but it's impos- 
sible. It doesn't stand to reason/' 

Art, like law, is the perfection of reason, and what- 
ever is unreasonable in the work of an artist is inar- 
tistic. By the time I had reached these bold conclu- 
sions I was ready to deduce a principle from them, 
and to declare that in a true civilization such a thing 
as that Hamlet would be forbidden, as an offence against 
public morals, a violence to something precious and 
sacred. 

In the absence of any public regulation the precious 
and sacred ideals in the arts must be trusted to the 
several artists, who bring themselves to judgment when 
they violate them. After Mme. Bernhardt was per- 
versely willing to attempt the part of Hamlet, the ques- 
tion whether she did it well or not was of slight conse- 
quence. She had already made her failure in wishing 
to play the part. Her wish impugned her greatness 
as an artist; of a really great actress it would have 
been as unimaginable as the assumption of a sublime 
feminine role by a really great actor. There is an ob- 
scure law in this matter which it would be interesting 
to trace, but for the present I must leave the inquiry 
with the reader. I can note merely that it seems some- 
how more permissible for women in imaginary actions 
to figure as men than for men to figure as women. In 
the theatre we have conjectured how and why this 
may be, but the privilege, for less obvious reasons, 
seems yet more liberally granted in fiction. A woman 
may tell a story in the character of a man and not give 
offence, but a man cannot write a novel in autobio- 
graphical form from the personality of a woman with- 
out imparting the sense of something unwholesome. 
One feels this true even in the work of such a master 

139 



LITERATURE AND LIFE 

as Tolstoy, whose Katia is a case in point. Perhaps a 
woman may play Hamlet with a less shocking effect 
than a man may play Desdemona, but all the same 
she must not play Hamlet at all. That sublime ideal 
is the property of the human imagination, and may 
not be profaned by a talent enamoured of the impossi- 
ble. No harm could be done by the broadest bur- 
lesque, the most irreverent travesty, for these would 
still leave the ideal untouched. Hamlet, after all the 
horse-play, would be Hamlet; but Hamlet played by 
a woman, to satisfy her caprice, or to feed her famine 
for a fresh effect, is Hamlet disabled, for a long time, 
at least, in its vital essence. I felt that it would take 
many returns to the Hamlet of Shakespeare to efface 
the impression of Mme. Bernhardt's Hamlet; and as 
I prepared to escape from my row of stalls in the dark- 
ening theatre, I experienced a noble shame for having 
seen the Dane so disnatured, to use Mr. Lowell's word. 
I had not been obliged to come ; I had voluntarily shared 
in the wrong done ; by my presence I had made myself 
an accomplice in the wrong. It was high ground, 
but not too high for me, and I recovered a measure of 
self-respect in assuming it. 



SPANISH PRISONERS OF WAR 

CERTAIN summers ago our cruisers, the St. 
Louis and the Harvard, arrived at Portsmouth, 
New Hampshire, with sixteen or seventeen hundred 
Spanish prisoners from Santiago de Cuba. They 
were partly soldiers of the land forces picked up by 
our troops in the fights before the city, but by far the 
greater part were sailors and marines from Cervera's 
ill-fated fleet. I have not much stomach for war, but 
the poetry of the fact I have stated made a very potent 
appeal to me on my literary side, and I did not hold 
out against it longer than to let the St. Louis get away 
with Cervera to Annapolis, when only her less digni- 
fied captives remained with those of the Harvard to 
feed either the vainglory or the pensive curiosity of the 
spectator. Then I went over from our summer colony 
to Kittery Point, and got a boat, and sailed out to have 
a look at these subordinate enemies in the first hours 
of their imprisonment. 



It was an afternoon of the brilliancy known only to 
an afternoon of the American summer, and the water 
of the swift Piscataqua River glittered in the sun with 
a really incomparable brilliancy. But nothing could 
light up the great monster of a ship, painted the dis- 
mal lead-color which our White Squadrons put on with 
the outbreak of the war, and she lay sullen in the stream 

141 



LITERATURE AND LIFE 

with a look of ponderous repose, to which the activities 
of the coaling-barges at her side, and of the sailors wash- 
ing her decks, seemed quite unrelated. A long gun for- 
ward and a long gun aft threatened the fleet of launches, 
tugs, dories, and cat-boats which fluttered about her, 
but the Harvard looked tired and bored, and seemed 
as if asleep. She had, in fact, finished her mission. 
The captives whom death had released had been car- 
ried out and sunk in the sea ; those who survived to a 
further imprisonment had all been taken to the pretty 
island a mile farther up in the river, where the tide 
rushes back and forth through the Narrows like a tor- 
rent. Its defiant rapidity has won it there the graphic 
name of Pull-and-be-Damned ; and we could only hope 
to reach the island by a series of skilful tacks, which 
should humor both the wind and the tide, both dead 
against us. Our boatman, one of those shore New- 
Englanders who are born with a knowledge of sail- 
ing, was easily master of the art of this, but it took 
time, and gave me more than the leisure I wanted for 
trying to see the shore with the strange eyes of the 
captives who had just looked upon it. It was beau- 
tiful, I had to own, even in my quality of exile and 
prisoner. The meadows and the orchards came down 
to the water, or, where the wandering line of the land 
was broken and lifted in black fronts of rock, they crept 
to the edge of the cliff and peered over it. A sum- 
mer hotel stretched its verandas along a lovely level; 
everywhere in clovery hollows and on breezy knolls 
were gray old farm-houses and summer cottages — like 
weather-beaten birds' nests, and like freshly painted 
marten-boxes; but all of a cold New England neat- 
ness which made me homesick for my malodorous 
Spanish fishing - village, shambling down in stony 
lanes to the warm tides of my native seas. Here, 
every place looked as if it had been newly scrubbed 

142 



SPANISH PRISONERS OF WAR 

with soap and water, and rubbed down with a coarse 
towel, and was of an antipathetic alertness. The 
sweet, keen breeze made me shiver, and the northern 
sky, from which my blinding southern sun was blaz- 
ing, was as hard as sapphire. 

I tried to bewilder myself in the ignorance of a Cata- 
lonian or Asturian fisherman, and to wonder with his 
darkened mind why it should all or any of it have been, 
and why I should have escaped from the iron hell in 
which I had fought no quarrel of my own to fall into 
the hands of strangers, and to be haled over seas to 
these alien shores for a captivity of unknown term. 
But I need not have been at so much pains ; the intelli- 
gence (I do not wish to boast) of an American author 
would have sufficed; for if there is anything more 
grotesque than another in war it is its monstrous in- 
consequence. If we had a grief with the Spanish 
government, and if it was so mortal we must do mur- 
der for it, we might have sent a joint committee of the 
House and Senate, and, with the improved means of 
assassination which modern science has put at our 
command, killed off the Spanish cabinet, and even 
the queen -mother and the little king. This would 
have been consequent, logical, and in a sort reason- 
able; but to butcher and capture a lot of wretched 
Spanish peasants and fishermen, hapless conscripts 
to whom personally and nationally we were as so many 
men in the moon, was that melancholy and humiliating 
necessity of war which makes it homicide in which there 
is not even the saving grace of hate, or the excuse of 
hot blood. 

I was able to console myself perhaps a little better 
for the captivity of the Spaniards than if I had really 
been one of them, as we drew nearer and nearer their 
prison isle, and it opened its knotty points and little 
ravines, overrun with sweet -fern, blueberry -bushes, 

143 



LITERATURE AND LIFE 

bay, and low blackberry-vines, and rigidly traversed 
with a high stockade of yellow pine boards. Six or 
eight long, low, wooden barracks stretched side by side 
across the general slope, with the captive officers' 
quarters, sheathed in weather-proof black paper, at 
one end of them. About their doors swarmed the 
common prisoners, spilling out over the steps and on 
the grass, where some of them lounged smoking. One 
operatic figure in a long blanket stalked athwart an 
open space; but there was such poverty of drama in 
the spectacle at the distance we were keeping that we 
were glad of so much as a shirt-sleeved contractor 
driving out of the stockade in his buggy. On the 
heights overlooking the enclosure Gatling guns were 
posted at three or four points, and every thirty or forty 
feet sentries met and parted, so indifferent to us, ap- 
parently, that we wondered if we might get nearer. 
We ventured, but at a certain moment a sentry called 
to us, "Fifty yards off, please \" Our young skipper 
answered, "All right/' and as the sentry had a gun 
on his shoulder which we had every reason to believe 
was loaded, it was easily our pleasure to retreat to the 
specified limit. In fact, we came away altogether, 
after that, so little promise was there of our being able 
to satisfy our curiosity further. We came away care- 
fully nursing such impression as we had got of a spec- 
tacle whose historical quality we did our poor best to 
feel. It related us, after solicitation, to the wars against 
the Moors, against the Mexicans and Peruvians, against 
the Dutch; to the Italian campaigns of the Gran Cap- 
itan, to the Siege of Florence, to the Sack of Rome, 
to the wars of the Spanish Succession, and I do not 
know what others. I do not deny that there was a 
certain aesthetic joy in having the Spanish prisoners 
there for this effect; we came away duly grateful for 
what we had seen of them; and we had long duly re- 

144 



SPANISH PRISONERS OF WAR 

signed ourselves to seeing no more, when word was 
sent to us that our young skipper had got a permit to 
visit the island, and wished us to go with him. 



II 

It was just such another afternoon when we went 
again, but this time we took the joyous trolley-car, 
and bounded and pirouetted along as far as the navy- 
yard of Kittery, and there we dismounted and walked 
among the vast, ghostly ship-sheds, so long empty 
of ships. The grass grew in the Kittery navy-yard, 
but it was all the pleasanter for the grass, and those 
pale, silent sheds were far more impressive in their si- 
lence than they would have been if resonant with saw 
and hammer. At several points, an unarmed marine 
left his leisure somewhere, and lunged across our path 
with a mute appeal for our permit; but we were no- 
where delayed till we came to the office where it had 
to be countersigned, and after that we had presently 
crossed a bridge, by shady, rustic ways, and were 
on the prison island. Here, if possible, the sense of 
something pastoral deepened; a man driving a file of 
cows passed before us under kindly trees, and the 
bell which the foremost of these milky mothers wore 
about her silken throat sent forth its clear, tender note 
as if from the depth of some grassy bosk, and instant- 
ly witched me away to the woods-pastures which my 
boyhood knew in southern Ohio. Even when we got to 
what seemed fortifications they turned out to be the 
walls of an old reservoir, and bore on their gate a pater- 
nal warning that children unaccompanied by adults 
were not allowed within. 

We mounted some stone steps over this portal and 
were met by a young marine, who left his Gatling gun 

145 



LITERATURE AND LIFE 

for a moment to ask for our permit, and then went back 
satisfied. Then we found ourselves in the presence 
of a sentry with a rifle on his shoulder, who was rather 
more exacting. Still, he only wished to be convinced, 
and when he had pointed out the headquarters where we 
were next to go, he let us over his beat. At the head- 
quarters there was another sentry, equally serious, 
but equally civil, and with the intervention of an or- 
derly our leader saw the officer of the day. He came 
out of the quarters looking rather blank, for he had 
learned that his pass admitted our party to the lines, 
but not to the stockade, which we might approach, 
at a certain point of vantage and look over into, but 
not penetrate. We resigned ourselves, as we must, 
and made what we could of the nearest prison barrack, 
whose door overflowed and whose windows swarmed 
with swarthy captives. Here they were, at such close 
quarters that their black, eager eyes easily pierced the 
pockets full of cigarettes which we had brought for 
them. They looked mostly very young, and there 
was one smiling rogue at the first window who was 
obviously prepared to catch anything thrown to him. 
He caught, in fact, the first box of cigarettes shied 
over the stockade; the next box flew open, and spilled 
its precious contents outside the dead-line under the 
window, where I hope some compassionate guard 
gathered them up and gave them to the captives. 

Our fellows looked capable of any kindness to their 
wards short of letting them go. They were a most 
friendly company, with an effect of picnicking there 
among the sweet-fern and blueberries, where they had 
pitched their wooden tents with as little disturbance 
to the shrubbery as possible. They were very polite 
to us, and when, after that misadventure with the 
cigarettes (I had put our young leader up to throwing 
the box, merely supplying the corpus delicti myself), 

146 



SPANISH PRISONERS OF WAR 

I wandered vaguely towards a Gatling gun planted 
on an earthen platform where the laurel and the dog- 
roses had been cut away for it, the man in charge ex- 
plained with a smile of apology that I must not pass 
a certain path I had already crossed. 

One always accepts the apologies of a man with a 
Gatling gun to back them, and I retreated. That 
seemed the end ; and we were going crestf allenly away 
when the officer of the day came out and allowed us to 
make his acquaintance. He permitted us, with laugh- 
ing reluctance, to learn that he had been in the fight 
at Santiago, and had come with the prisoners, and he 
was most obligingly sorry that our permit did not 
let us into the stockade. I said I had some cigarettes 
for the prisoners, and I supposed I might send them 
in, but he said he could not allow this, for they had 
money to buy tobacco; and he answered another of 
our party, who had not a soul above buttons, and who 
asked if she could get one from the Spaniards, that 
so far from promoting her wish, he would have been 
obliged to take away any buttons she might have got 
from them. 

"The fact is," he explained, "you've come to the 
wrong end for transactions in buttons and tobacco." 

But perhaps innocence so great as ours had wrought 
upon him. When we said we were going, and thanked 
him for his unavailing good-will, he looked at his 
watch and said they were just going to feed the pris- 
oners; and after some parley he suddenly called out, 
"Music of the guard!" Instead of a regimental band, 
which I had supposed summoned, a single corporal 
ran out the barracks, touching his cap. 

" Take this party round to the gate," the officer said, 
and he promised us that he would see us there, and 
hoped we would not mind a rough walk. We could 
have answered that to see his prisoners fed we would 

147 



LITERATURE AND LIFE 

wade through fathoms of red-tape ; but in fact we were 
arrested at the last point by nothing worse than the 
barbed wire which fortified the outer gate. Here two 
marines were willing to tell us how well the prisoners 
lived, while we stared into the stockade through an 
inner gate of plank which was run back for us. They 
said the Spaniards had a breakfast of coffee, and hash 
or stew and potatoes, and a dinner of soup and roast; 
and now at five o'clock they were to have bread and 
coffee, which indeed we saw the white-capped, white- 
jacketed cooks bringing out in huge tin wash-boilers. 
Our marines were of opinion, and no doubt rightly, 
that these poor Spaniards had never known in their 
lives before what it was to have full stomachs. But 
the marines said they never acknowledged it, and the 
one who had a German accent intimated that grati- 
tude was not a virtue of any Roman (I suppose he meant 
Latin) people. But I do not know that if I were a pris- 
oner, for no fault of my own, I should be very explicit- 
ly thankful for being unusually well fed. I thought 
(or I think now) that a fig or a bunch of grapes would 
have been more acceptable to me under my own vine 
and fig-tree than the stew and roast of captors who 
were indeed showing themselves less my enemies than 
my own government, but were still not quite my hosts. 



Ill 

How is it the great pieces of good luck fall to us? 
The clock strikes twelve as it strikes two, and with no 
more premonition. As we stood there expecting noth- 
ing better of it than three at the most, it suddenly struck 
twelve. Our officer appeared at the inner gate and 
bade our marines slide away the gate of barbed wire 
and let us into the enclosure, where he welcomed us to 

148 



SPANISH PRISONERS OF WAR 

seats on the grass against the stockade, with many 
polite regrets that the tough little knots of earth beside 
it were not chairs. 

The prisoners were already filing out of their quar- 
ters, at a rapid trot towards the benches where those 
great wash-boilers of coffee were set. Each man had 
a soup-plate and bowl of enamelled tin, and each in 
his turn received quarter of a loaf of fresh bread and a 
big ladleful of steaming coffee, which he made off with 
to his place at one of the long tables under a shed at 
the side of the stockade. One young fellow tried to 
get a place not his own in the shade, and our officer 
when he came back explained that he was a guerril- 
lero, and rather unruly. We heard that eight of the 
prisoners were in irons, by sentence of their own officers, 
for misconduct, but all save this guerrillero here were 
docile and obedient enough, and seemed only too glad 
to get peacefully at their bread and coffee. 

First among them came the men of the Cristdbal 
Coldn, and these were the best looking of all the cap- 
tives. From their pretty fair average the others varied 
to worse and worse, till a very scrub lot, said to be ex- 
convicts, brought up the rear. They were nearly all 
little fellows, and very dark, though here and there a 
six-footer towered up, or a blond showed among them. 
They were joking and laughing together, harmlessly 
enough, but I must own that they looked a crew of 
rather sorry jail-birds; though whether any run of 
humanity clad in misfits of our navy blue and white, 
and other chance garments, with close-shaven heads, 
and sometimes bare feet, would have looked much less 
like jail-birds I am not sure. Still, they were not pre- 
possessing, and though some of them were pathetically 
young, they had none of the charm of boyhood. No 
doubt they did not do themselves justice, and to be herd- 
ed there like cattle did not improve their chances of 

149 



LITERATURE AND LIFE 

making a favorable impression on the observer. They 
were kindly used by our officer and his subordinates, 
who mixed among them, and straightened out the con- 
fusion they got into at times, and perhaps sometimes 
wilfully. Their guards employed a few handy words 
of Spanish with them ; where these did not avail, they 
took them by the arm and directed them; but I did not 
hear a harsh tone, and I saw no violence, or even so 
much indignity offered them as the ordinary trolley- 
car passenger is subjected to in Broadway. At a cer- 
tain bugle-call they dispersed, when they had finished 
their bread and coffee, and scattered about over the 
grass, or returned to their barracks. We were told 
that these children of the sun dreaded its heat, and 
kept out of it whenever they could, even in its decline ; 
but they seemed not so much to withdraw and hide 
themselves from that, as to vanish into the history of 
"old, unhappy, far-off" times, where prisoners of war 
properly belong. I roused myself with a start as if I 
had lost them in the past. 

Our officer came towards us and said gayly, " Well, 
you have seen the animals fed/' and let us take our 
grateful leave. I think we were rather a loss, in our 
going, to the marines, who seemed glad of a chance to 
talk. I am sure we were a loss to the man on guard 
at the inner gate, who walked his beat with reluc- 
tance when it took him from us, and eagerly when it 
brought him back. Then he delayed for a rapid and 
comprehensive exchange of opinions and ideas, suc- 
cessfully blending military subordination with Amer- 
ican equality in his manner. 

The whole thing was very American in the perfect 
decorum and the utter absence of ceremony. Those 
good fellows were in the clothes they wore through 
the fights at Santiago, and they could not have put 
on much splendor if they had wished, but apparently 

150 



SPANISH PRISONERS OF WAR 

they did not wish. They were simple, straightfor- 
ward, and adequate. There was some dry joking 
about the superiority of the prisoners' rations and 
lodgings, and our officer ironically professed his in- 
tention of messing with the Spanish officers. But 
there was no grudge, and not a shadow of ill will, or 
of that stupid and atrocious hate towards the public 
enemy which abominable newspapers and politicians 
had tried to breed in the popular mind. There was 
nothing manifest but a sort of cheerful purpose to live 
up to that military ideal of duty which is so much 
nobler than the civil ideal of self-interest. Perhaps 
duty will yet become the civil ideal, when the peoples 
shall have learned to live for the common good, and 
are united for the operation of the industries as they 
now are for the hostilities. 



IV 

Shall I say that a sense of something domestic, 
something homelike, imparted itself from what I had 
seen? Or was this more properly an effect from our 
visit, on the way back to the hospital, where a hun- 
dred and fifty of the prisoners lay sick of wounds and 
fevers? I cannot say that a humaner spirit prevailed 
here than in the camp; it was only a more positive 
humanity which was at work. Most of the sufferers 
were stretched on the clean cots of two long, airy, wooden 
shells, which received them, four days after the orders 
for their reception had come, with every equipment 
for their comfort. At five o'clock, when we passed 
down the aisles between their beds, many of them had 
a gay, nonchalant effect of having toothpicks or cigar- 
ettes in their mouths; but it was really the thermom- 
eters with which the nurses were taking their tem- 

151 



LITERATURE AND LIFE 

perature. It suggested a possibility to me, however, 
and I asked if they were allowed to smoke, and being 
answered that they did smoke, anyway, whenever 
they could, I got rid at last of those boxes of cigarettes 
which had been burning my pockets, as it were, all 
afternoon. I gave them to such as I was told were the 
most deserving among the sick captives, but Heaven 
knows I would as willingly have given them to the 
least. They took my largesse gravely, as became 
Spaniards; one said, smiling sadly, " Muchas gracias," 
but the others merely smiled sadly; and I looked in 
vain for the response which would have twinkled up 
in the faces of even moribund Italians at our looks 
of pity. Italians would have met our sympathy half- 
way; but these poor fellows were of another tradition, 
and in fact not all the Latin peoples are the same, 
though we sometimes conveniently group them to- 
gether for our detestation. Perhaps there are even 
personal distinctions among their several nationali- 
ties, and there are some Spaniards who are as true 
and kind as some Americans. When we remember 
Cortez let us not forget Las Casas. 

They lay in their beds there, these little Spanish 
men, whose dark faces their sickness could not blanch 
to more than a sickly sallow, and as they turned their 
dull black eyes upon us I must own that I could not 
" support the government " so fiercely as I might have 
done elsewhere. But the truth is, I was demoralized 
by the looks of these poor little men, who, in spite of 
their character of public enemies, did look so much 
like somebody's brothers, and even somebody's chil- 
dren. I may have been infected by the air of com- 
passion, of scientific compassion, which prevailed in 
the place. There it was as wholly business to be kind 
and to cure as in another branch of the service it was 
business to be cruel and to kill. How droll these things 

152 



SPANISH PRISONERS OF WAR 

are! The surgeons had their favorites among the 
patients, to all of whom they were equally devoted; 
inarticulate friendships had sprung up between them 
and certain of their hapless foes, whom they spoke of 
as "a sort of pets." One of these was very useful in 
making the mutinous take their medicine; another 
was liked apparently because he was so likable. At 
a certain cot the chief surgeon stopped and said, " We 
did not expect this boy to live through the night." 
He took the boy's wrist between his thumb and finger, 
and asked tenderly as he leaned over him, " Poco 
mejor?" The boy could not speak to say that he 
was a little better; he tried to smile — such things 
do move the witness; nor does the sight of a man 
whose bandaged cheek has been half chopped away 
by a machete tend to restore one's composure. 



THE MIDNIGHT PLATOON 

HE had often heard of it. Connoisseurs of such 
matters, young newspaper men trying to make 
literature out of life and smuggle it into print under 
the guard of unwary editors, and young authors eager 
to get life into their literature, had recommended it to 
him as one of the most impressive sights of the city ; 
and he had willingly agreed with them that he ought 
to see it. He imagined it very dramatic, and he was 
surprised to find it in his experience so largely sub- 
jective. If there was any drama at all it was wholly 
in his own consciousness. But the thing was certain- 
ly impressive in its way. 



He thought it a great piece of luck that he should 
come upon it by chance, and so long after he had for- 
gotten about it that he was surprised to recognize it 
for the spectacle he had often promised himself the 
pleasure of seeing. 

Pleasure is the right word ; for pleasure of the pain- 
ful sort that all hedonists will easily imagine was 
what he expected to get from it ; though upon the face 
of it there seems no reason why a man should delight 
to see his fellow-men waiting in the winter street for 
the midnight dole of bread which must in some cases 
be their only meal from the last midnight to the next 

154 



THE MIDNIGHT PLATOON 

midnight. But the mere thought of it gave him pleas- 
ure, and the sight of it, from the very first instant. 
He was proud of knowing just what it was at once, 
with the sort of pride which one has in knowing an 
earthquake, though one has never felt one before. 
He saw the double file of men stretching up one street, 
and stretching down the other from the corner of the 
bakery where the loaves were to be given out on the 
stroke of twelve, and he hugged himself in a luxurious 
content with his perspicacity. 

It was all the more comfortable to do this because 
he was in a coupe, warmly shut against the sharp, 
wholesome Christmas- week weather, and was wrapped 
to the chin in a long fur overcoat, which he wore that 
night as a duty to his family, with a conscience against 
taking cold and alarming them for his health. He 
now practised another piece of self-denial: he let the 
cabman drive rapidly past the interesting spectacle, and 
carry him to the house where he was going to fetch 
away the child from the Christmas party. He wished 
to be in good time, so as to save the child from anx- 
iety about his coming; but he promised himself to 
stop, going back, and glut his sensibility in a leisurely 
study of the scene. He got the child, with her arms 
full of things from the Christmas-tree, into the coupe, 
and then he said to the cabman, respectfully leaning 
as far over from his box to listen as his thick great- 
coat would let him : " When you get up there near that 
bakery again, drive slowly. I want to have a look at 
those men/' 

"All right, sir," said the driver intelligently, and he 
found his way skilfully out of the street among the 
high banks of the seasonable Christmas- week snow, 
which the street-cleaners had heaped up there till they 
could get round to it with their carts. 

When they were in Broadway again it seemed lone- 

155 



LITERATURE AND LIFE 

lier and silenter than it was a few minutes be. ore. Ex- 
cept for their own coupe, the cable-cars, with their 
naming foreheads, and the mechanical clangor of 
their gongs at the corners, seemed to have it alto- 
gether to themselves. A tall, lumbering United States 
mail van rolled by, and impressed my friend in the 
coupe with a cheap and agreeable sense of mystery 
relative to the letters it was carrying to their varied 
destination at the Grand Central Station. He listened 
with half an ear to the child's account of the fun she 
had at the party, and he watched with both eyes for 
the sight of the men waiting at the bakery for the char- 
ity of the midnight loaves. 

He played with a fear that they might all have van- 
ished, and with an apprehension that the cabman 
might forget and whirl him rapidly by the place where 
he had left them. But the driver remembered, and 
checked his horses in good time; and there were the 
men still, but in even greater number than before, 
stretching farther up Broadway and farther out along 
the side street. They stood slouched in dim and sol- 
emn phalanx under the night sky, so seasonably clear 
and frostily atwinkle with Christmas - week stars; 
two by two they stood, slouched close together, per- 
haps for their mutual warmth, perhaps in an uncon- 
scious effort to get near the door where the loaves were 
to be given out, in time to share in them before they 
were all gone. 

II 

My friend's heart beat with glad anticipation. He 
was really to see this important, this representative 
thing to the greatest possible advantage. He rapidly 
explained to his companion that the giver of the mid- 
night loaves got rid of what was left of his daily bread 

156 




"THEY STOOD SLOUCHED IN DIM AND SOLEMN PHALANX UNDER 
THE NIGHT SKY " 



THE MIDNIGHT PLATOON 

in that way : the next day it could not be sold, and he 
preferred to give it away to those who needed it, rather 
than try to find his account in it otherwise. She un- 
derstood, and he tried to think that sometimes coffee 
was given with the bread, but he could not make sure 
of this, though he would have liked very much to have 
it done ; it would have been much more dramatic. After- 
wards he learned that it was done, and he was proud 
of having fancied it. 

He decided that when he came alongside of the Broad- 
way file he would get out, and go to the side door of the 
bakery and watch the men receiving the bread. Per- 
haps he would find courage to speak to them, and ask 
them about themselves. At the time it did not strike 
him that it would be indecent. 

A great many things about them were open to rea- 
sonable conjecture. It was not probable that they were 
any of them there for their health, as the saying is. 
They were all there because they were hungry, or else 
they were there in behalf of some one else who was 
hungry. But it was always possible that some of them 
were impostors, and he wondered if any test was ap- 
plied to them that would prove them deserving or un- 
deserving. If one were poor, one ought to be deserving ; 
if one were rich, it did not so much matter. 

It seemed to him very likely that if he asked these 
men questions they would tell him lies. A fantastic 
association of their double files and those of the gal- 
ley-slaves whom Don Quixote released, with the tonguey 
Gines de Passamonte at their head, came into his mind. 
He smiled, and then he thought how these men were 
really a sort of slaves and convicts — slaves to want and 
self-convicted of poverty. All at once he fancied them 
actually manacled there together, two by two, a coffle 
of captives taken in some cruel foray, and driven to a 
market where no man wanted to buy. He thought 

157 



LITERATURE AND LIFE 

how old their slavery was ; and he wondered if it would 
ever be abolished, as other slaveries had been. Would 
the world ever outlive it? Would some New- Year's 
day come when some President would proclaim, amid 
some dire struggle, that their slavery was to be no 
more? That would be fine. 



Ill 

He noticed how still the most of them were. A few 
of them stepped a little out of the line, and stamped to 
shake off the cold; but all the rest remained motion- 
less, shrinking into themselves, and closer together. 
They might have been their own dismal ghosts, they 
were so still, with no more need of defence from the 
cold than the dead have. 

He observed now that not one among them had a fur 
overcoat on ; and at a second glance he saw that there 
was not an overcoat of any kind among them. He 
made his reflection that if any of them were impostors, 
and not true men, with real hunger, and if they were 
alive to feel that stiff, wholesome, Christmas - week 
cold, they were justly punished for their deceit. 

He was interested by the celerity, the simultaneity 
of his impressions, his reflections. It occurred to him 
that his abnormal alertness must be something like 
that of a drowning person, or a person in mortal peril, 
and being perfectly safe and well, he was obscurely 
flattered by the fact. 

To test his condition further he took note of the fine 
mass of the great dry-goods store on the hither cor- 
ner, blocking itself out of the blue-black night, and of 
the Gothic beauty of the church beyond, so near that 
the come of captives might have issued from its sculpt- 
ured portal, after vain prayer. 

158 



THE MIDNIGHT PLATOON 

Fragments of conjecture, of speculation, drifted 
through his mind. How early did these files begin 
to form themselves for the midnight dole of bread? 
As early as ten, as nine o'clock? If so, did the fact 
argue habitual destitution, or merely habitual leisure? 
Did the slaves in the come make acquaintance, or re- 
main strangers to one another, though they were close- 
ly neighbored night after night by their misery? Per- 
haps they joked away the weary hours of waiting; 
they must have their jokes. Which of them were old- 
comers, and which novices? Did they ever quarrel 
over questions of precedence? Had they some comity, 
some etiquette, which a man forced to leave his place 
could appeal to, and so get it back? Could one say to 
his next-hand man, "Will you please keep my place?" 
and would this man say to an interloper, " Excuse me, 
this place is engaged " ? How was it with them, when 
the coffle worked slowly or swiftly past the door where 
the bread and coffee were given out, and word passed 
to the rear that the supply was exhausted? This 
must sometimes happen, and what did they do then? 



IV 

My friend did not quite like to think. Vague, re- 
proachful thoughts for all the remote and immediate 
luxury of his life passed through his mind. If he re- 
formed that and gave the saving to hunger and cold? 
But what was the use? There was so much hunger, 
so much cold, that it could not go round. 

The cabman was obeying his orders too faithfully. 
He was not only walking by the Broadway coffle, he 
was creeping by. His action caught the notice of the 
slaves, and as the coupe" passed them they all turned 
and faced it, like soldiers under review making ready 

159 



LITERATURE AND LIFE 

to salute a superior. They were perfectly silent, per- 
fectly respectful, but their eyes seemed to pierce the 
coupe through and through. 

My friend was suddenly aware of a certain quality 
of representivity ; he stood to these men for all the ease 
and safety that they could never, never hope to know. 
He was Society : Society that was to be preserved be- 
cause it embodies Civilization. He wondered if they 
hated him in his capacity of Better Classes. He no 
longer thought of getting out and watching their be- 
havior as they took their bread and coffee. He would 
have liked to excuse that thought, and protest that he 
was ashamed of it ; that he was their friend, and wished 
them well — as well as might be without the sacrifice 
of his own advantages or superfluities, which he could 
have persuaded them would be perfectly useless. He 
put his hand on that of his companion trembling on 
his arm with sympathy, or at least with intelligence. 

" You mustn't mind. What we are and what we do 
is all right. It's what they are and what they suffer 
that's all wrong/' 

V 

"Does that view of the situation still satisfy you?" 
I asked, when he had told me of this singular experi- 
ence; I liked his apparently not coloring it at all. 

" I don't know," he answered. " It seems to be the 
only way out." 

"Well, it's an easy way," I admitted, "and it's an 
idea that ought to gratify the midnight platoon." 



THE BEACH AT ROCKAWAY 

I CONFESS that I cannot hear people rejoice in their 
summer sojourn as beyond the reach of excur- 
sionists without a certain rebellion; and yet I have 
to confess also that after spending a Sunday afternoon 
of late July, four or five years ago, with the excur- 
sionists at one of the beaches near New York, I was 
rather glad that my own summer sojourn was not 
within reach of them. I know very well that the ex- 
cursionists must go somewhere, and as a man and a 
brother I am willing they should go anywhere, but as 
a friend of quiet and seclusion I should be sorry to 
have them come much where I am. It is not because 
I would deny them a share of any pleasure I enjoy, 
but because they are so many and I am so few that I 
think they would get all the pleasure and I none. I 
hope the reader will see how this attitude distinguishes 
me from the selfish people who inhumanly exult in 
their remoteness from excursionists. 



It was at Rockaway Beach that I saw these fellow- 
beings whose mere multitude was too much for me. 
They were otherwise wholly without offence towards 
me, and so far as I noted, towards each other; they 
were, in fact, the most entirely peaceable multitude 
I ever saw in any country, and the very quietest. 
11 161 



LITERATURE AND LIFE 

There were thousands, mounting well up towards tens 
of thousands, of them, in every variety of age and 
sex; yet I heard no voice lifted above the conversa- 
tional level, except that of some infant ignorant of its 
privileges in a day at the sea-side, or some showman 
crying the attractions of the spectacle in his charge. 
I used to think the American crowds rather boister- 
ous and unruly, and many years ago, when I lived 
in Italy, I celebrated the greater amiability and self- 
control of the Italian crowds. But we have certainly 
changed all that within a generation, and if what I 
saw the other day was a typical New York crowd, 
then the popular joy of our poorer classes is no longer 
the terror it once was to the peaceful observer. The 
tough was not visibly present, nor the toughness, 
either of the pure native East Side stock or of the Celtic 
extraction; yet there were large numbers of Amer- 
icans with rather fewer recognizable Irish among the 
masses, who were mainly Germans, Russians, Poles, 
and the Jews of these several nationalities. 

There was eating and drinking without limit, on 
every hand and in every kind, at the booths abound- 
ing in fried sea-food, and at the tables under all the 
wide-spreading verandas of the hotels and restaurants ; 
yet I saw not one drunken man, and of course not 
any drunken women. No one that I saw was even 
affected by drink, and no one was guilty of any rude 
or unseemly behavior. The crowd was, in short, a 
monument to the democratic ideal of life in that very 
important expression of life, personal conduct, I have 
not any notion who or what the people were, or how 
virtuous or vicious they privately might be; but I 
am sure that no society assemblage could be of a 
goodlier outside; and to be of a goodly outside is all 
that the mere spectator has a right to ask of any 
crowd. 

162 



THE BEACH AT ROCKAWAY 

I fancied, however, that great numbers of this crowd, 
or at least all the Americans in it, were Long-Islanders 
from the inland farms and villages within easy dis- 
tance of the beach. They had probably the heredi- 
tary habit of coming to it, for it was a favorite resort 
in the time of their fathers and grandfathers, who 
had— 

— " many an hour whiled away 
Listening to the breakers' roar 

That washed the beach at Rockaway." 

But the clothing store and the paper pattern have 
equalized the cheaper dress of the people so that you 
can no longer know citizen and countryman apart by 
their clothes, still less citizeness and countrywoman; 
and I can only conjecture that the foreign-looking folk 
I saw were from New York and Brooklyn. They 
came by boat, and came and went by the continual- 
ly arriving and departing trains, and last but not 
least by bicycles, both sexes. A few came in the 
public carriages and omnibuses of the neighborhood, 
but by far the vaster number whom neither the boats 
nor the trains had brought had their own vehicles, 
the all-pervading bicycles, which no one seemed so 
poor as not to be able to keep. The bicyclers stormed 
into the frantic village of the beach the whole after- 
noon, in the proportion of one woman to five men, 
and most of these must have ridden down on their 
wheels from the great cities. Boys ran about in the 
roadway with bunches of brasses, to check the wheels, 
and put them for safe-keeping in what had once been 
the stable-yards of the hotels; the restaurants had 
racks for them, where you could see them in solid 
masses, side by side, for a hundred feet, and no shop 
was without its door-side rack, which the wheelman 
might slide his wheel into when he stopped for a soda. 

163 



LITERATURE AND LIFE 

a cigar, or a sandwich. All along the road the gay 
bicycler and bicycless swarmed upon the piazzas of 
the inns, munching, lunching, while their wheels 
formed a fantastic decoration for the underpinning 
of the house and a novel balustering for the steps. 



II 

The amusements provided for these throngs of peo- 
ple were not different from those provided for throngs 
of people everywhere, who must be of much the same 
mind and taste the world over. I had fine moments 
when I moved in an illusion of the Midway Plaisance ; 
again I was at the F£te de Neuilly, with all of Paris 
but the accent about me; yet again the county agri- 
cultural fairs of my youth spread their spectral joys 
before me. At none of these places, however, was 
there a sounding sea or a mountainous chute, and I 
made haste to experience the variety these afforded, 
beginning with the chute, since the sea was always 
there, and the chute might be closed for the day if I 
waited to view it last. I meant only to enjoy the pleas- 
ure of others in it, and I confined my own participation 
to the ascent of the height from which the boat plunges 
down the watery steep into the oblong pool below. 
When I bought my ticket for the car that carried pas- 
sengers up, they gave me also a pasteboard medal, 
certifying for me, "You have shot the chute/' and I 
resolved to keep this and show it to doubting friends 
as a proof of my daring; but it is a curious evidence 
of my unfitness for such deceptions that I afterwards 
could not find the medal. So I will frankly own that 
for me it was quite enough to see others shoot the chute, 
and that I came tamely down myself in the car. There 
is a very charming view from the top, of the sea with 

164 



THE BEACH AT ROCKAWAY 

its ships, and all the mad gayety of the shore, but of 
course my main object was to exult in the wild ab- 
surdity of those who shot the chute. There was al- 
ways a lady among the people in the clumsy flat-boat 
that flew down the long track, and she tried usually 
to be a pretty girl, who clutched her friends and lovers 
and shrieked aloud in her flight ; but sometimes it was 
a sober mother of a family, with her brood about her, 
who was probably meditating, all the way, the incul- 
pation of their father for any harm that came of it. 
Apparently no harm came of it in any case. The boat 
struck the water with the impetus gained from a half- 
perpendicular slide of a hundred feet, bounded high 
into the air, struck again and again, and so flounced 
awkwardly across the pond to the farther shore, where 
the passengers debarked and went away to commune 
with their viscera, and to get their breath as they could. 
I did not ask any of them what their emotions or sen- 
sations were, but, so far as I could conjecture, the 
experience of shooting the chute must comprise the 
rare transport of a fall from a ten-story building and 
the delight of a tempestuous passage of the Atlantic, 
powerfully condensed. 

The mere sight was so athletic that it took away 
any appetite I might have had to witness the feats of 
strength performed by Madame La Noire at the near- 
est booth on my coming out, though madame herself 
was at the door to testify, in her own living picture, 
how much muscular force may be masked in vast 
masses of adipose. She had a weary, bored look, 
and was not without her pathos, poor soul, as few of 
those are who amuse the public; but I could not find 
her quite justifiable as a Sunday entertainment. One 
forgot, however, what day it was, and for the time 
I did not pretend to be so much better than my neigh- 
bors that I would not compromise upon a visit to an 

165 



LITERATURE AND LIFE 

animal show a little farther on. It was a pretty fair 
collection of beasts that had once been wild, perhaps, 
and in the cage of the lions there was a slight, sad- 
looking, long-haired young man, exciting them to 
madness by blows of a whip and pistol-shots, whom 
I was extremely glad to have get away without being 
torn in pieces, or at least bitten in two. A little later 
I saw him at the door of the tent, very breathless, di- 
shevelled, and as to his dress not of the spotlessness 
one could wish. But perhaps spotlessness is not com- 
patible with the intimacy of lions and lionesses. He 
had had his little triumph; one spectator of his feat 
had declared that you would not see anything like that 
at Coney Island; and soiled and dusty as he was in 
his cotton tights, he was preferable to the living pict- 
ure of a young lady whom he replaced as an attrac- 
tion of the show. It was professedly a moral show; 
the manager exhorted us as we came out to say whether 
it was good or not; and in the box-office sat a kind 
and motherly faced matron who would have appar- 
ently abhorred to look upon a living picture at any 
distance, much less have it at her elbow. 

Upon the whole, there seemed a melancholy mis- 
take in it all; the people to whom the showmen made 
their appeal were all so much better, evidently, than 
the showmen supposed; the showmen themselves ap- 
peared harmless enough, and one could not say that 
there was personally any harm in the living picture; 
rather she looked listless and dull, but as to the face 
respectable enough. 

I would not give the impression that most of the 
amusements were not in every respect decorous. As 
a means of pleasure, the merry-go-round, both hori- 
zontal with horses and vertical with swinging cradles, 
prevailed, and was none the worse for being called 
by the French name of carrousel, for our people an- 

166 



THE BEACH AT ROCKAWAY 

glicize the word, and squeeze the last drop of Gallic 
wickedness from it by pronouncing it carousal. At 
every other step there were machines for weighing 
you and ascertaining your height; there were pho- 
tographers' booths, and X-ray apparatus for show- 
ing you the inside of your watch; and in one open 
tent I saw a gentleman (with his back to the public) 
having his fortune read in the lines of his hand by 
an Egyptian seeress. Of course there was everywhere 
soda, and places of the softer drinks abounded. 



Ill 

I think you could only get a hard drink by order- 
ing something to eat and sitting down to your wine 
or beer at a table. Again I say that I saw no effects 
of drink in the crowd, and in one of the great restau- 
rants built out over the sea on piers, where there was 
perpetual dancing to the braying of a brass-band, the 
cotillon had no fire imparted to its figures by the fumes 
of the bar. In fact it was a very rigid sobriety that 
reigned here, governing the common behavior by 
means of the placards which hung from the roof over 
the heads of the dancers, and repeatedly announced 
that gentlemen were not allowed to dance together, 
or to carry umbrellas or canes while dancing, while 
all were entreated not to spit on the floor. 

The dancers looked happy and harmless, if not 
very wise or splendid ; they seemed people of the same 
simple neighborhoods, village lovers, young wives 
and husbands, and parties of friends who had come 
together for the day's pleasure. A slight mother, 
much weighed down by a heavy baby, passed, rapt 
in an innocent envy of them, and I think she and the 
child's father meant to join them as soon as they could 

167 



LITERATURE AND LIFE 

find a place where to lay it. Almost any place would 
do ; at another great restaurant I saw two chairs faced 
together, and a baby sleeping on them as quietly amid 
the coming and going of lagers and frankfurters as 
if in its cradle at home. 

Lagers and frankfurters were much in evidence 
everywhere, especially frankfurters, which seemed to 
have whole booths devoted to broiling them. They 
disputed this dignity with soft-shell crabs, and sec- 
tions of eels, piled attractively on large platters, or 
sizzling to an impassioned brown in deep skillets of 
fat. The old acrid smell of frying brought back many 
holidays of Italy to me, and I was again at times on 
the Riva at Venice, and in the Mercato Vecchio at Flor- 
ence. But the Continental Sunday cannot be felt to 
have quite replaced the old American Sabbath yet; 
the Puritan leaven works still, and though so many 
of our own people consent willingly to the transforma- 
tion, I fancy they always enjoy themselves on Sunday 
with a certain consciousness of wrong-doing. 



IV 

I have already said that the spectator quite lost 
sense of what day it was. Nothing could be more 
secular than all the sights and sounds. It was the 
Fourth of July, less the fire - crackers and the drunk- 
enness, and it was the high day of the week. But 
if it was very wicked, and I must recognize that the 
scene would be shocking to most of my readers, I feel 
bound to say that the people themselves did not look 
wicked. They looked harmless; they even looked 
good, the most of them. I am sorry to say they were 
not very good-looking. The women were pretty enough, 
and the men were handsome enough; perhaps the 

168 



THE BEACH AT ROCKAWAY 

average was higher in respect of beauty than the 
average is anywhere else; I was lately from New 
England, where the people were distinctly more hard- 
favored; but among all those thousands at Rocka- 
way I found no striking types. It may be that as we 
grow older and our satisfaction with our own looks 
wanes, we become more fastidious as to the looks of 
others. At any rate, there seems to be much less 
beauty in the world than there was thirty or forty 
years ago. 

On the other hand, the dresses seem indefinitely 
prettier, as they should be in compensation. When 
we were all so handsome we could well afford to wear 
hoops or peg-top trousers, but now it is different, and 
the poor things must eke out their personal ungainli- 
ness with all the devices of the modiste and the tailor. 
I do not mean that there was any distinction in the 
dress of the crowd, but I saw nothing positively ugly 
or grotesquely out of taste. The costumes were as 
good as the customs, and I have already celebrated 
the manners of this crowd. I believe I must except 
the costumes of the bicyclesses, who were unfailingly 
dumpy in effect when dismounted, and who were all 
the more lamentable for tottering about, in their short 
skirts, upon the tips of their narrow little, sharp-point- 
ed, silly high-heeled shoes. How severe I am! But 
those high heels seemed to take all honesty from 
their daring in the wholesome exercise of the wheel, 
and to keep them in the tradition of cheap coquetry 
still, and imbecilly dependent. 



I have almost forgotten in the interest of the human 
spectacle that there is a sea somewhere about at Rock- 

169 



LITERATURE AND LIFE 

away Beach, and it is this that the people have come 
for. I might well forget that modest sea, it is so built 
out of sight by the restaurants and bath-houses and 
switch-backs and shops that border it, and by the hotels 
and saloons and shows flaring along the road that 
divides the village, and the planked streets that in- 
tersect this. But if you walk southward on any of 
the streets, you presently find the planks foundering in 
sand, which drifts far up over them, and then you 
find yourself in full sight of the ocean and the ocean 
bathing. Swarms and heaps of people in all lolling 
and lying and wallowing shapes strew the beach, 
and the water is full of slopping and shouting and 
shrieking human creatures, clinging with bare white 
arms to the life-lines that run from the shore to the 
buoys; beyond these the life-guard stays himself in 
his boat with outspread oars, and rocks on the incom- 
ing surf. 

All that you can say of it is that it is queer. It is 
not picturesque, or poetic, or dramatic; it is queer. 
An enfilading glance gives this impression and no 
other; if you go to the balcony of the nearest marine 
restaurant for a flanking eye-shot, it is still queer, 
with the added effect, in all those arms upstretched 
to the life-lines, of frogs' legs inverted in a downward 
plunge. 

On the sand before this spectacle I talked with a 
philosopher of humble condition who backed upon 
me and knocked my umbrella out of my hand. This 
made us beg each other's pardon; he said that he did 
not know I was there, and I said it did not matter. 
Then we both looked at the bathing, and he said : 

"I don't like that." 

"Why," I asked, "do you see any harm in it?" 

" No. But I don't like the looks of it. It ain't nice. 
It's — queer." 

170 



THE BEACH AT ROCKAWAY 

It was indeed like one of those uncomfortable dreams 
where you are not dressed sufficiently for company, 
or perhaps at all, and yet are making a very pub- 
lic appearance. This promiscuous bathing was not 
much in excess of the convention that governs the 
sea-bathing of the politest people; it could not be; 
and it was marked by no grave misconduct. Here 
and there a gentleman was teaching a lady to swim, 
with his arms round her; here and there a wild nereid 
was splashing another; a young Jew pursued a flight 
of naiads with a section of dead eel in his hand. But 
otherwise all was a damp and dreary decorum. I 
challenged my philosopher in vain for a specific cause 
of his dislike of the scene. 

Most of the people on the sand were in bathing- 
dress, but there were a multitude of others who had 
apparently come for the sea-air and not the sea-bath- 
ing. A mother sat with a sick child on her knees; 
babies were cradled in the sand asleep, and people 
walked carefully round and over them. There were 
everywhere a great many poor mothers and children, 
who seemed getting the most of the good that was 
going. 

VI 

But upon the whole, though I drove away from the 
beach celebrating the good temper and the good order 
of the scene to an applausive driver, I have since thought 
of it as rather melancholy. It was in fact no wiser or 
livelier than a society function in the means of enjoy- 
ment it afforded. The best thing about it was that it 
left the guests very much to their own devices. The 
established pleasures were clumsy and tiresome-look- 
ing; but one could eschew them. The more of them 
one eschewed, the merrier perhaps; for I doubt if the 

171 



LITERATURE AND LIFE 

race is formed for much pleasure; and even a day's 
rest is more than most people can bear. They endure 
it in passing, but they get home weary and cross, even 
after a twenty-mile run on the wheel. The road, by- 
the-by, was full of homeward wheels by this time, 
single and double and tandem, and my driver pro- 
fessed that their multitude greatly increased the diffi- 
culties of his profession. 



AMERICAN LITERARY CENTRES 

ONE of the facts which we Americans have a diffi- 
culty in making clear to a rather inattentive 
world outside is that, while we have apparently a lit- 
erature of our own, we have no literary centre. We 
have so much literature that from time to time it seems 
even to us we must have a literary centre. We say to 
ourselves, with a good deal of logic, Where there is so 
much smoke there must be some fire, or at least a fire- 
place. But it is just here that, misled by tradition, and 
even by history, we deceive ourselves. Really, we have 
no fireplace for such fire as we have kindled ; or, if any 
one is disposed to deny this, then I say, we have a dozen 
fireplaces ; which is quite as bad, so far as the notion 
of a literary centre is concerned, if it is not worse. 

I once proved this fact to my own satisfaction in some 
papers which I wrote several years ago ; but it appears, 
from a question which has lately come to me from Eng- 
land, that I did not carry conviction quite so far as that 
island ; and I still have my work all before me, if I un- 
derstand the London friend who wishes "a comparative 
view of the centres of literary production " among us ; 
" how and why they change ; how they stand at present ; 
and what is the relation, for instance, of Boston to other 
such centres." 



Here, if I cut my coat according to my cloth, I should 
have a garment which this whole volume would hard- 

173 



LITERATURE AND LIFE 

ly stuff out with its form ; and I have a fancy that if I 
begin by answering, as I have sometimes rather too 
succinctly done, that we have no more a single liter- 
ary centre than Italy or than Germany has (or had be- 
fore their unification), I shall not be taken at my word. 
I shall be right, all the same, and if I am told that 
in those countries there is now a tendency to such a 
centre, I can only say that there is none in this, and 
that, so far as I can see, we get further every day from 
having such a centre. The fault, if it is a fault, grows 
upon us, for the whole present tendency of American 
life is centrifugal, and just so far as literature is the 
language of our life, it shares this tendency. I do not 
attempt to say how it will be when, in order to spread 
ourselves over the earth, and convincingly to preach 
the blessings of our deeply incorporated civilization 
by the mouths of our eight-inch guns, the mind of the 
nation shall be politically centred at some capital; 
that is the function of prophecy, and I am only writ- 
ing literary history, on a very small scale, with a some- 
what crushing sense of limits. 

Once, twice, thrice there was apparently an Amer- 
ican literary centre: at Philadelphia, from the time 
Franklin went to live there until the death of Charles 
Brockden Brown, our first romancer; then at New 
York, during the period which may be roughly de- 
scribed as that of Irving, Poe, Willis, and Bryan^; 
then at Boston, for the thirty or forty years illumined 
by the presence of Longfellow, Lowell, Whittier, Haw- 
thorne, Emerson, Holmes, Prescott, Parkman, and 
many lesser lights. These are all still great publish- 
ing centres. If it were not that the house with the 
largest list of American authors was still at Boston, 
I should say New York was now the chief publishing 
centre; but in the sense that London and Paris, or 
even Madrid and Petersburg, are literary centres, with 

174 



AMERICAN LITERARY CENTRES 

a controlling influence throughout England and France, 
Spain and Russia, neither New York nor Boston is 
now our literary centre, whatever they may once have 
been. Not to take Philadelphia too seriously, I may 
note that when New York seemed our literary centre 
Irving alone among those who gave it lustre was a 
New-Yorker, and he mainly lived abroad; Bryant, 
who was a New-Englander, was alone constant to the 
city of his adoption; Willis, a Bostonian, and Poe, a 
Marylander, went and came as their poverty or their 
prosperity compelled or invited; neither dwelt here 
unbrokenly, and Poe did not even die here, though 
he often came near starving. One cannot then strict- 
ly speak of any early American literary centre except 
Boston, and Boston, strictly speaking, was the New 
England literary centre. 

However, we had really no use for an American 
literary centre before the Civil War, for it was only 
after the Civil War that we really began to have an 
American literature. Up to that time we had a Co- 
lonial literature, a Knickerbocker literature, and a 
New England literature. But as soon as the country 
began to feel its life in every limb with the coming of 
peace, it began to speak in the varying accents of all 
the different sections — North, East, South, West, and 
Farthest West ; but not before that time. 



II 

Perhaps the first note of this national concord, or 
discord, was sounded from California, in the voices 
of Mr. Bret Harte, of Mark Twain, of Mr. Charles 
Warren Stoddard (I am sorry for those who do not 
know his beautiful Idyls of the South Seas), and others 
of the remarkable group of poets and humorists whom 

175 



LITERATURE AND LIFE 

these names must stand for. The San Francisco 
school briefly flourished from 1867 till 1872 or so, and 
while it endured it made San Francisco the first na- 
tional literary centre we ever had, for its writers were 
of every American origin except Calif ornian. 

After the Pacific Slope, the great Middle West found 
utterance in the dialect verse of Mr. John Hay, and 
after that began the exploitation of all the local par- 
lances, which has sometimes seemed to stop, and then 
has begun again. It went on in the South in the 
fables of Mr. Joel Chandler Harris's Uncle Remus, 
and in the fiction of Miss Murfree, who so long mas- 
queraded as Charles Egbert Craddock. Louisiana 
found expression in the Creole stories of Mr. G. W. 
Cable, Indiana in the Hoosier poems of Mr. James 
Whitcomb Riley, and central New York in the novels 
of Mr. Harold Frederic; but nowhere was the new im- 
pulse so firmly and finely directed as in New England, 
where Miss Sarah Orne Jewett's studies of country 
life antedated Miss Mary Wilkins's work. To be 
sure, the portrayal of Yankee character began before 
either of these artists was known; Lowell's Bigelow 
Papers first reflected it ; Mrs. Stowe's Old Town Stories 
caught it again and again; Mrs. Harriet Prescott 
Spofford, in her unromantic moods, was of an excel- 
lent fidelity to it; and Mrs. Rose Terry Cooke was 
even truer to the New England of Connecticut. With 
the later group Mrs. Lily Chase Wyman has pictured 
Rhode Island work-life with truth pitiless to the be- 
holder, and full of that tender humanity for the ma- 
terial which characterizes Russian fiction. 

Mr. James Lane Allen has let in the light upon 
Kentucky ; the Red Men and White of the great plains 
have found their interpreter in Mr. Owen Wister, a 
3 7 oung Philadelphian witness of their dramatic con- 
ditions and characteristics; Mr. Hamlin Garland had 

176 



AMERICAN LITERARY CENTRES 

already expressed the sad circumstances of the rural 
Northwest in his pathetic idyls, colored from the ex- 
perience of one who had been part of what he saw. 
Later came Mr. Henry B. Fuller, and gave us what 
was hardest and most sordid, as well as something 
of what was most touching and most amusing, in the 
hurly-burly of Chicago. 

Ill 

A survey of this sort imparts no just sense of the 
facts, and I own that I am impatient of merely nam- 
ing authors and books that each tempt me to an ex- 
pansion far beyond the limits of this essay; for, if I 
may be so personal, I have watched the growth of our 
literature in Americanism with intense sympathy. 
In my poor way I have always liked the truth, and in 
times past I am afraid that I have helped to make it 
odious to those who believed beauty was something 
different ; but I hope that I shall not now be doing our 
decentralized literature a disservice by saying that its 
chief value is its honesty, its fidelity to our decentral- 
ized life. Sometimes I wish this were a little more 
constant ; but upon the whole I have no reason to com- 
plain ; and I think that as a very interested spectator of 
New York I have reason to be content with the verac- 
ity with which some phases of it have been rendered. 
The lightning — or the flash-light, to speak more ac- 
curately — has been rather late in striking this un- 
gainly metropolis, but it has already got in its work 
with notable effect at some points. This began, I 
believe, with the local dramas of Mr. Edward Har- 
rigan, a species of farces, or sketches of character, 
loosely hung together, with little sequence or relevancy, 
upon the thread of a plot which would keep the stage 
for two or three hours. It was very rough magic, as 

177 



LITERATURE AND LIFE 

a whole, but in parts it was exquisite, and it held the 
mirror up towards politics on their social and political 
side, and gave us East-Side types — Irish, German, 
negro, and Italian — which were instantly recognizable 
and deliciously satisfying. I never could understand 
why Mr. Harrigan did not go further, but perhaps he 
had gone far enough; and, at any rate, he left the 
field open for others. The next to appear noticeably 
in it was Mr. Stephen Crane, whose Red Badge of 
Courage wronged the finer art which he showed in 
such New York studies as Maggie: A Girl of the Streets, 
and George's Mother. He has been followed by Abra- 
ham Cahan, a Russian Hebrew, who has done por- 
traits of his race and nation with uncommon power. 
They are the very Russian Hebrews of Hester Street 
translated from their native Yiddish into English, 
which the author mastered after coming here in his 
early manhood. He brought to his work the artistic 
qualities of both the Slav and the Jew, and in his Jekl: 
A Story of the Ghetto, he gave proof of talent which 
his more recent book of sketches — The Imported Bride- 
groom — confirms. He sees his people humorously, 
and he is as unsparing of their sordidness as he is 
compassionate of their hard circumstance and the 
somewhat frowsy pathos of their lives. He is a Social- 
ist, but his fiction is wholly without " tendentious- 
ness." 

A good many years ago — ten or twelve, at least — 
Mr. Harry Harland had shown us some politer New 
York Jews, with a romantic coloring, though with 
genuine feeling for the novelty and picturesqueness 
of his material ; but I do not think of any one who has 
adequately dealt with our Gentile society. Mr. James 
has treated it historically in Washington Square, and 
more modernly in some passages of The Bostonians, as 
well as in some of his shorter stories ; Mr. Edgar Faw- 

178 



AMERICAN LITERARY CENTRES 

cett has dealt with it intelligently and authoritatively 
in a novel or two; and Mr. Brander Matthews has 
sketched it, in this aspect, and that with his Gallic 
cleverness, neatness, and point. In the novel, His Fa- 
ther's Son, he in fact faces it squarely and renders cer- 
tain forms of it with masterly skill. He has done 
something more distinctive still in The Action and the 
Word, one of the best American stories I know. But 
except for these writers, our literature has hardly taken 
to New York society. 

IV 

It is an even thing : New York society has not taken 
to our literature. New York publishes it, criticises it, 
and circulates it, but I doubt if New York society much 
reads it or cares for it, and New York is therefore by no 
means the literary centre that Boston once was, though 
a large number of our literary men live in or about 
New York. Boston, in my time at least, had dis- 
tinctly a literary atmosphere, which more or less per- 
vaded society; but New York has distinctly nothing 
of the kind, in any pervasive sense. It is a vast mart, 
and literature is one of the things marketed here; but 
our good society cares no more for it than for some 
other products bought and sold here; it does not care 
nearly so much for books as for horses or for stocks, 
and I suppose it is not unlike the good society of any 
other metropolis in this. To the general, here, jour- 
nalism is a far more appreciable thing than literature, 
and has greater recognition, for some very good rea- 
sons; but in Boston literature had vastly more honor, 
and even more popular recognition, than journalism. 
There journalism desired to be literary, and here lit- 
erature has to try hard not to be journalistic. If New 
York is a literary centre on the business side, as Lon- 

179 



LITERATURE AND LIFE 

don is, Boston was a literary centre, as Weimar was, 
and as Edinburgh was. It felt literature, as those 
capitals felt it, and if it did not love it quite so much 
as might seem, it always respected it. 

To be quite clear in what I wish to say of the present 
relation of Boston to our other literary centres, I must 
repeat that we have now no such literary centre as 
Boston was. Boston itself has perhaps outgrown the 
literary consciousness which formerly distinguished 
it from all our other large towns. In a place of near- 
ly a million people (I count in the outlying places) 
newspapers must be more than books ; and that alone 
says everything. 

Mr. Aldrich once noticed that whenever an author 
died in Boston, the New-Yorkers thought they had 
a literary centre; and it is by some such means that 
the primacy has passed from Boston, even if it has 
not passed to New York. But still there is enough 
literature left in the body at Boston to keep her first 
among equals in some things, if not easily first in all. 

Mr. Aldrich himself lives in Boston, and he is, with 
Mr. Stedman, the foremost of our poets. At Cam- 
bridge live Colonel T. W. Higginson, an essayist in a 
certain sort without rival among us ; and Mr. William 
James, the most interesting and the most literary of 
psychologists, whose repute is European as well as 
American. Mr. Charles Eliot Norton alone survives 
of the earlier Cambridge group — Longfellow, Lowell, 
Richard Henry Dana, Louis Agassiz, Francis J. Child, 
and Henry James, the father of the novelist and the 
psychologist. 

To Boston Mr. James Ford Rhodes, the latest of our 
abler historians, has gone from Ohio; and there Mr. 
Henry Cabot Lodge, the Massachusetts Senator, whose 
work in literature is making itself more and more 
known, was born and belongs, politically, socially, and 

180 



AMERICAN LITERARY CENTRES 

intellectually. Mrs. Julia Ward Howe, a poet of wide 
fame in an elder generation, lives there; Mr. T. B. Al- 
drich lives there; and thereabouts live Mrs. Elizabeth 
Stuart Phelps Ward and Mrs. Harriet Prescott Spof- 
ford, the first of a fame beyond the last, who was 
known to us so long before her. Then at Boston, or 
near Boston, live those artists supreme in the kind of 
short story which we have carried so far : Miss Jewett, 
Miss Wilkins, Miss Alice Brown, Mrs. Chase- Wyman, 
and Miss Gertrude Smith, who comes from Kansas, 
and writes of the prairie farm-life, though she leaves 
Mr. E. W. Howe (of The Story of a Country Town 
and presently of the Atchison Daily Globe) to consti- 
tute, with the humorous poet Ironquill, a frontier lit- 
erary centre at Topeka. Of Boston, too, though she 
is of western Pennsylvania origin, is Mrs. Margaret 
Deland, one of our most successful novelists. Miss 
Wilkins has married out of Massachusetts into New 
Jersey, and is the neighbor of Mr. H. M. Alden at 
Metuchen. 

All these are more or less embodied and represented 
in the Atlantic Monthly, still the most literary, and in 
many things still the first of our magazines. Finally, 
after the chief publishing house in New York, the 
greatest American publishing house is in Boston, with 
by far the largest list of the best American books. 
Recently several firms of younger vigor and valor have 
recruited the wasted ranks of the Boston publishers, 
and are especially to be noted for the number of rather 
nice new poets they give to the light. 



Dealing with the question geographically, in the 
right American way, we descend to Hartford oblique- 

181 



LITERATURE AND LIFE 

ly by way of Springfield, Massachusetts, where, in a 
little city of fifty thousand, a newspaper of metropol- 
itan influence and of distinctly literary tone is pub- 
lished. At Hartford while Charles Dudley Warner 
lived, there was an indisputable literary centre; Mark 
Twain lives there no longer, and now we can scarcely 
count Hartford among our literary centres, though it 
is a publishing centre of much activity in subscription 
books. 

At New Haven, Yale University has latterly at- 
tracted Mr. William H. Bishop, whose novels I always 
liked for the best reasons, and has long held Professor 
J. T. Lounsbury, who is, since Professor Child's death 
at Cambridge, our best Chaucer scholar. Mr. Donald 
G. Mitchell, once endeared to the whole fickle Amer- 
ican public by his Reveries of a Bachelor and his Dream 
Life, dwells on the borders of the pleasant town, which 
is also the home of Mr. J. W. De Forest, the earliest 
real American novelist, and for certain gifts in seeing 
and telling our life also one of the greatest. 

As to New York (where the imagination may ar- 
rive daily from New Haven, either by a Sound boat 
or by eight or ten of the swiftest express trains in the 
world), I confess I am more and more puzzled. Here 
abide the poets, Mr. R. H. Stoddard, Mr. E. C. Sted- 
man, Mr. R. W. Gilder, and many whom an envious 
etcetera must hide from view; the fictionists, Mr. R. 
H. Davis, Mrs. Kate Douglas Wiggin, Mr. Brander 
Matthews, Mr. Frank Hopkinson Smith, Mr. Abraham 
Cahan, Mr. Frank Norris, and Mr. James Lane Allen, 
who has left Kentucky to join the large Southern 
contingent, which includes Mrs. Burton Harrison 
and Mrs. McEnery Stuart; the historians, Professor 
William M. Sloane and Dr. Eggleston (reformed from 
a novelist) ; the literary and religious and economic 
essayists, Mr. Hamilton W. Mabie, Mr. H. M. Alden, 

182 



AMERICAN LITERARY CENTRES 

Mr. J. J. Chapman, and Mr. E. L. Godkin, with critics, 
dramatists, satirists, magazinists, and journalists of 
literary stamp in number to convince the wavering 
reason against itself that here beyond all question is 
the great literary centre of these States. There is 
an Authors' Club, which alone includes a hundred 
and fifty authors, and, if you come to editors, there is 
simply no end. Magazines are published here and 
circulated hence throughout the land by millions ; and 
books by the ton are the daily output of our publishers, 
who are the largest in the country. 

If these things do not mean a great literary centre, 
it would be hard to say what does ; and I am not going 
to try for a reason against such facts. It is not qual- 
ity that is wanting, but perhaps it is the quantity of 
the quality ; there is leaven, but not for so large a lump. 
It may be that New York is going to be our literary 
centre, as London is the literary centre of England, 
by gathering into itself all our writing talent, but it 
has by no means done this yet. What we can say 
is that more authors come here from the West and 
South than go elsewhere ; but they often stay at home, 
and I fancy very wisely. Mr. Joel Chandler Harris 
stays at Atlanta, in Georgia; Mr. James Whitcomb 
Riley stays at Indianapolis; Mr. Maurice Thompson 
spent his whole literary life, and General Lew. Wallace 
still lives at Crawfordsville, Indiana; Mr. Madison 
Cawein stays at Louisville, Kentucky; Miss Murfree 
stays at St. Louis, Missouri; Francis R. Stockton 
spent the greater part of the year at his place in West 
Virginia, and came only for the winter months to New 
York; Mr. Edward Bellamy, until his failing health 
exiled him to the Far West, remained at Chicopee, 
Massachusetts; and I cannot think of one of these 
writers whom it would have advantaged in any lit- 
erary wise to dwell in New York. He would not have 

183 



LITERATURE AND LIFE 

found greater incentive than at home ; and in society 
he would not have found that literary tone which all 
society had, or wished to have, in Boston when Boston 
was a great town and not yet a big town. 

In fact, I doubt if anywhere in the world there was 
ever so much taste and feeling for literature as there 
was in that Boston. At Edinburgh (as I imagine it) 
there was a large and distinguished literary class, 
and at Weimar there was a cultivated court circle; 
but in Boston there was not only such a group of 
authors as we shall hardly see here again for hundreds 
of years, but there was such regard for them and their 
calling, not only in good society, but among the ex- 
tremely well-read people of the whole intelligent city, 
as hardly another community has shown. New York, 
I am quite sure, never was such a centre, and I see 
no signs that it ever will be. It does not influence 
the literature of the whole country as Boston once did 
through writers whom all the young writers wished 
to resemble; it does not give the law, and it does not 
inspire the love that literary Boston inspired. There 
is no ideal that it represents. 

A glance at the map of the Union will show how 
very widely our smaller literary centres are scattered; 
and perhaps it will be useful in following me to other 
more populous literary centres. Dropping southward 
from New York, now, we find ourselves in a literary 
centre of importance at Philadelphia, since that is the 
home of Mr. J! B. McMasters, the historian of the 
American people; of Mr. Owen Wister, whose fresh 
and vigorous work I have mentioned; and of Dr. Weir 
Mitchell, a novelist of power long known to the better 
public, and now recognized by the larger in the im- 
mense success of his historical romance, Hugh Wynne. 

If I skip Baltimore, I may ignore a literary centre 
of great promise, but while I do not forget the excel- 

184 



AMERICAN LITERARY CENTRES 

lent work of Johns Hopkins University in training 
men for the solider literature of the future, no Balti- 
more names to conjure with occur to me at the mo- 
ment ; and we must really get on to Washington. This, 
till he became ambassador at the Court of St. James, 
was the home of Mr. John Hay, a poet whose biog- 
raphy of Lincoln must rank him with the historians, 
and whose public service as Secretary of State classes 
him high among statesmen. He blotted out one lit- 
erary centre at Cleveland, Ohio, when he removed to 
Washington, and Mr. Thomas Nelson Page another at 
Richmond, Virginia, when he came to the national 
capital. Mr. Paul Dunbar, the first negro poet to di- 
vine and utter his race, carried with him the literary 
centre of Dayton, Ohio, when he came to be an em- 
ploye* in the Congressional Library; and Mr. Charles 
Warren Stoddard, in settling at Washington as Pro- 
fessor of Literature in the Catholic University, brought 
somewhat indirectly away with him the last traces of 
the old literary centre at San Francisco. 

A more recent literary centre in the Californian 
metropolis went to pieces when Mr. Gelett Burgess 
came to New York and silenced the Lark, a bird of 
as new and rare a note as ever made itself heard in 
this air ; but since he has returned to California, there 
is hope that the literary centre may form itself there 
again. I do not know whether Mrs. Charlotte Per- 
kins Stetson wrecked a literary centre in leaving Los 
Angeles or not. I am sure only that she has enriched 
the literary centre of New York by the addition of a 
talent in sociological satire which would be extraordi- 
nary even if it were not altogether unrivalled among us. 

Could one say too much of the literary centre at 
Chicago? I fancy, yes; or too much, at least, for the 
taste of the notable people who constitute it. In Mr. 
Henry B. Fuller we have reason to hope, from what 

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LITERATURE AND LIFE 

he has already done, an American novelist of such 
greatness that he may well leave being the great 
American novelist to any one who likes taking that 
role. Mr. Hamlin Garland is another writer of gen- 
uine and original gift who centres at Chicago; and 
Mrs. Mary Catherwood has made her name well known 
in romantic fiction. Miss Edith Wyatt is a talent, 
newly known, of the finest quality in minor fiction; 
Mr. Robert Herrick, Mr. Will Payne in their novels, 
and Mr. George Ade and Mr. Peter Dunn in their sat- 
ires form with those named a group not to be matched 
elsewhere in the country. It would be hard to match 
among our critical journals the Dial of Chicago; and 
with a fair amount of publishing in a sort of books 
often as good within as they are uncommonly pretty 
without, Chicago has a claim to rank with our first 
literary centres. 

It is certainly to be reckoned not so very far below 
London, which, with Mr. Henry James, Mr. Harry 
Harland, and Mr. Bret Harte, seems to me an Ameri- 
can literary centre worthy to be named with contem- 
porary Boston. Which is our chief literary centre, 
however, I am not, after all, ready to say. When I 
remember Mr. G. W. Cable, at Northampton, Massa- 
chusetts, I am shaken in all my preoccupations ; when 
I think of Mark Twain, it seems to me that our great- 
est literary centre is just now at Riverdaie-on-the- 
Hudson. 



SAWDUST IN THE ARENA 

IT was in the old Roman arena of beautiful Verona 
that the circus events I wish to speak of took place ; 
in fact, I had the honor and profit of seeing two cir- 
cuses there. Or, strictly speaking, it was one entire 
circus that I saw, and the unique speciality of another, 
the dying glory of a circus on its last legs, the trium- 
phal fall of a circus superb in adversity. 



The entire circus was altogether Italian, with the 
exception of the clowns, who, to the credit of our na- 
tion, are always Americans, or advertised as such, 
in Italy. Its chief and almost absorbing event was 
a reproduction of the tournament which had then 
lately been held at Rome in celebration of Prince Tom- 
maso's coming of age, and for a copy of a copy it was 
really fine. It had fitness in the arena, which must 
have witnessed many such mediaeval shows in their 
time, and I am sensible still of the pleasure its effects 
of color gave me. There was one beautiful woman, 
a red blonde in a green velvet gown, who might have 
ridden, as she was, out of a canvas of Titian's, if he 
had ever painted equestrian pictures, and who at any 
rate was an excellent Carpaccio. Then, the Clowns 
Americani were very amusing, from a platform de- 
voted solely to them, and it was a source of pride if 

i8 7 



LITERATURE AND LIFE 

not of joy with me to think that we were almost the 
only people present who understood their jokes. In 
the vast oval of the arena, however, the circus ring 
looked very little, not half so large, say, as the rim 
of a lady's hat in front of you at the play; and on 
the gradines of the ancient amphitheatre we were all 
such a great way off that a good field -glass would 
have been needed to distinguish the features of the 
actors. I could not make out, therefore, whether the 
Clowns Americani had the national expression or 
not, but one of them, I am sorry to say, spoke the 
United States language with a cockney accent. I 
suspect that he was an Englishman who had passed 
himself off upon the Italian management as a true 
Yankee, and who had formed himself upon our school 
of clowning, just as some of the recent English hu- 
morists have patterned after certain famous wits of ours. 
I do not know that I would have exposed this impos- 
tor, even if occasion had offered, for, after all, his fraud 
was a tribute to our own primacy in clowning, and the 
Veronese were none the worse for his erring aspirates. 
The audience was for me the best part of the spec- 
tacle, as the audience always is in Italy, and I indulged 
my fancy in some cheap excursions concerning the 
place and people. I reflected that it was the same 
race essentially as that which used to watch the glad- 
iatorial shows in that arena when it was new, and that 
very possibly there were among these spectators per- 
sons of the same blood as those Veronese patricians 
who had left their names carved on the front of the 
gradines in places, to claim this or that seat for their 
own. In fact, there was so little difference, probably, 
in their qualities, from that time to this, that I felt the 
process of the generations to be a sort of impertinence ; 
and if Nature had been present, I might very well 
have asked her why, when she had once arrived at a 

188 



SAWDUST IN THE ARENA 

given expression of humanity, she must go on repeat- 
ing it indefinitely? How were all those similar souls 
to know themselves apart in their common eternity? 
Merely to have been differently circumstanced in time 
did not seem enough; and I think Nature would have 
been puzzled to answer me. But perhaps not ; she may 
have had her reasons, as that you cannot have too 
much of a good thing, and that when the type was so 
fine in most respects as the Italian you could not do 
better than go on repeating impressions from it. 

Certainly I myself could have wished no variation 
from it in the young officer of bersaglieri, who had 
come down from antiquity to the topmost gradine of 
the arena over against me, and stood there defined 
against the clear evening sky, one hand on his hip, 
and the other at his side, while his thin cockerel plumes 
streamed in the light wind. I have since wondered 
if he knew how beautiful he was, and I am sure that, 
if he did not, all the women there did, and that was 
doubtless enough for the young officer of bersaglieri. 



II 

I think that he was preliminary to the sole event of 
that partial circus I have mentioned. This event was 
one that I have often witnessed elsewhere, but never 
in such noble and worthy keeping. The top of the 
outer arena wall must itself be fifty feet high, and the 
pole in the centre of its oval seemed to rise fifty feet 
higher yet. At its base an immense net was stretched, 
and a man in a Prince Albert coat and a derby hat 
was figuring about, anxiously directing the work- 
men who were fixing the guy-ropes, and testing every 
particular of the preparation with his own hands. 
While this went on, a young girl ran out into the arena, 

189 



LITERATURE AND LIFE 

and, after a bow to the spectators, quickly mounted to 
the top of the pole, where she presently stood in stat- 
uesque beauty that took all eyes even from the love- 
liness of the officer of bersaglieri. Then the man in 
the Prince Albert coat and the derby hat stepped back 
from the net and looked up at her. 

She called down, in English that sounded like some 
delocalized, denaturalized speech, it was so strange 
then and there, " Is it all right?" 

He shouted back in the same alienated tongue, 
"Yes; keep to the left," and she dived straight down- 
ward in the long plunge, till, just before she reached 
the net, she turned a quick somersault into its elastic 
mesh. 

It was all so exquisitely graceful that one forgot 
how wickedly dangerous it was; but I think that the 
brief English colloquy was the great wonder of the 
event for me, and I doubt if I could ever have been 
perfectly happy again, if chance had not amiably 
suffered me to satisfy my curiosity concerning the 
speakers. A few evenings after that, I was at that 
copy of a copy of a tournament, and, a few gradines 
below me, I saw the man of the Prince Albert coat and 
the derby hat. I had already made up my mind that 
he was an American, for I supposed that an English- 
man would rather perish than wear such a coat with 
such a hat, and as I had wished all my life to speak 
to a circus-man, I went down and boldly accosted 
him. "Are you a brother Yankee?" I asked, and 
he laughed, and confessed that he was an English- 
man, but he said he was glad to meet any one who 
spoke English, and he made a place for me by his side. 
He was very willing to tell how he happened to be 
there, and he explained that he was the manager of 
a circus, which had been playing to very good business 
all winter in Spain. In an evil hour he decided to 

190 



SAWDUST IN THE ARENA 

come to Italy, but he found the prices so ruinously 
low that he was forced to disband his company. This 
diving-girl was all that remained to him of its many 
attractions, and he was trying to make a living for 
both in a country where the admission to a circus was 
six of our cents, with fifty for a reserved seat. But 
he was about to give it up and come to America, where 
he said Barnum had offered him an engagement. I 
hope he found it profitable, and is long since an Amer- 
ican citizen, with as good right as any of us to wear a 
Prince Albert coat with a derby hat. 



Ill 

There used to be very good circuses in Venice, where 
many Venetians had the only opportunity of their 
lives to see a horse. The horses were the great at- 
traction for them, and, perhaps in concession to their 
habitual destitution in this respect, the riding was 
providentially very good. It was so good that it did 
not bore me, as circus-riding mostly does, especially 
that of the silk-clad jockey who stands in his high 
boots, on his backbared horse, and ends by waving an 
American flag in triumph at having been so tiresome. 

I am at a loss to know why they make such an ado 
about the lady who jumps through paper hoops, which 
have first had holes poked in them to render her tran- 
sit easy, or why it should be thought such a merit in 
her to hop over a succession of banners which are 
swept under her feet in a manner to minify her exer- 
tion almost to nothing, but I observe it is so at all cir- 
cuses. At my first Venetian circus, which was on a 
broad expanse of the Riva degli Schiavoni, there was 
a girl who flung herself to the ground and back to her 
horse again, holding by his mane with one hand, 

191 



LITERATURE AND LIFE 

quite like the goddess out of the bath-gown at my 
village circus the other day; and apparently there 
are more circuses in the world than circus events. It 
must be as hard to think up anything new in that 
kind as in romanticistic fiction, which circus - acting 
otherwise largely resembles. 

At a circus which played all one winter in Florence 
I saw for the first time — outside of polite society — the 
clown in evening dress, who now seems essential to 
all circuses of metropolitan pretensions, and whom I 
missed so gladly at my village circus. He is nearly as 
futile as the lady clown, who is one of the saddest and 
strangest developments of New Womanhood. 

Of the clowns who do not speak, I believe I like most 
the clown who catches a succession of peak-crowned 
soft hats on his head, when thrown across the ring by 
an accomplice. This is a very pretty sight always, 
and at the Hippodrome in Paris I once saw a gifted 
creature take his stand high up on the benches among 
the audience and catch these hats on his head from a 
flight of a hundred feet through the air. This made 
me proud of human nature, which is often so humili- 
ating; and altogether I do not think that after a real 
country circus there are many better things in life 
than the Hippodrome. It had a state, a dignity, a 
smoothness, a polish, which I should not know where 
to match, and when the superb coach drove into the 
ring to convey the lady performers to the scene of 
their events, there was a majesty in the effect which 
I doubt if courts have the power to rival. Still, it 
should be remembered that I have never been at court, 
and speak from a knowledge of the Hippodrome only. 



AT A DIME MUSEUM 

"I SEE/' said my friend, "that you have been writ- 
1 ing a good deal about the theatre during the 
past winter. You have been attacking its high hats 
and its high prices, and its low morals ; and I suppose 
that you think you have done good, as people call it." 



This seemed like a challenge of some sort, and I 
prepared myself to take it up warily. I said I should 
be very sorry to do good, as people called it; because 
such a line of action nearly always ended in spiritual 
pride for the doer and general demoralization for the 
doee. Still, I said, a law had lately been passed in 
Ohio giving a man who found himself behind a high 
hat at the theatre a claim for damages against the 
manager ; and if the passage of this law could be traced 
ever so faintly and indirectly to my teachings, I should 
not altogether grieve for the good I had done. I added 
that if all the States should pass such a law, and other 
laws fixing a low price for a certain number of seats 
at the theatres, or obliging the managers to give one 
free performance every month, as the law does in Paris, 
and should then forbid indecent and immoral plays — 

"I see what you mean," said my friend, a little im- 
patiently. "You mean sumptuary legislation. But 
I have not come to talk to you upon that subject, for 
15 193 



LITERATURE AND LIFE 

then you would probably want to do all the talking 
yourself. I want to ask you if you have visited any 
of the cheaper amusements of this metropolis, or know 
anything of the really clever and charming things 
one may see there for a very little money." 

"Ten cents, for instance?" 

"Yes." 

I answered that I would never own to having come 
as low down as that; and I expressed a hardy and 
somewhat inconsistent doubt of the quality of the 
amusement that could be had for that money. I ques- 
tioned if anything intellectual could be had for it. 

"What do you say to the ten-cent magazines?" my 
friend retorted. "And do you pretend that the two- 
dollar drama is intellectual?" 

I had to confess that it generally was not, and that 
this was part of my grief with it. 

Then he said: "I don't contend that it is intellect- 
ual, but I say that it is often clever and charming at 
the ten-cent shows, just as it is less often clever and 
charming in the ten-cent magazines. I think the aver- 
age of propriety is rather higher than it is at the two- 
dollar theatres ; and it is much more instructive at the 
ten-cent shows, if you come to that. The other day," 
said my friend, and in squaring himself comfortably 
in his chair and finding room for his elbow on the cor- 
ner of my table he knocked off some books for review, 
" I went to a dime museum for an hour that I had be- 
tween two appointments, and I must say that I never 
passed an hour's time more agreeably. In the curio 
hall, as one of the lecturers on the curios called it — 
they had several lecturers in white wigs and scholars' 
caps and gowns — there was not a great deal to see, I 
confess; but everything was very high-class. There 
was the inventor of a perpetual motion, who lectured 
upon it and explained it from a diagram. There was 

194 



AT A DIME MUSEUM 

a fortune-teller in a three-foot tent whom I did not 
interview; there were five macaws in one cage, and 
two gloomy apes in another. On a platform at the 
end of the hall was an Australian family a good deal 
gloomier than the apes, who sat in the costume of our 
latitude, staring down the room with varying expres- 
sions all verging upon melancholy madness, and who 
gave me such a pang of compassion as I have seldom 
got from the tragedy of the two-dollar theatres. They 
allowed me to come quite close up to them, and to feed 
my pity upon their wild dejection in exile without 
stint. I couldn't enter into conversation with them, 
and express my regret at finding them so far from 
their native boomerangs and kangaroos and pine- 
tree grubs, but I know they felt my sympathy, it was 
so evident. I didn't see their performance, and I don't 
know that they had any. They may simply have 
been there ethnologically, but this was a good object, 
and the sight of their spiritual misery was alone worth 
the price of admission. 

"After the inventor of the perpetual motion had 
brought his harangue to a close, we all went round 
to the dais where a lady in blue spectacles lectured 
us upon a fire-escape which she had invented, and 
operated a small model of it. None of the events were 
so exciting that we could regret it when the chief 
lecturer announced that this was the end of the en- 
tertainment in the curio hall, and that now the per- 
formance in the theatre was about to begin. He in- 
vited us to buy tickets at an additional charge of five, 
ten, or fifteen cents for the gallery, orchestra circle, 
or orchestra. 

"I thought I could afford an orchestra stall, for 
once. We were three in the orchestra, another man 
and a young mother, not counting the little boy she 
had with her; there were two people in the gallery, 

195 



LITERATURE AND LIFE 

and a dozen at least in the orchestra circle. An at- 
tendant shouted, 'Hats off!' and the other man and 
I uncovered, and a lady came up from under the stage 
and began to play the piano in front of it. The cur- 
tain rose, and the entertainment began at once. It 
was a passage apparently from real life, and it in- 
volved a dissatisfied boarder and the daughter of the 
landlady. There was not much coherence in it, but 
there was a good deal of conscience on the part of the 
actors, who toiled through it with unflagging energy. 
The young woman was equipped for the dance she 
brought into it at one point rather than for the part 
she had to sustain in the drama. It was a very blame- 
less dance, and she gave it as if she was tired of it, 
but was not going to falter. She delivered her lines 
with a hard, Southwestern accent, and I liked fancy- 
ing her having come up in a simpler-hearted section 
of the country than ours, encouraged by a strong local 
belief that she was destined to do Juliet and Lady 
Macbeth, or Peg Woffington at the least; but very 
likely she had not. 

"Her performance was followed by an event in- 
volving a single character. The actor, naturally, was 
blackened as to his skin, but as to his dress he was 
all in white, and at the first glance I could see that he 
had temperament. I suspect that he thought I had, 
too, for he began to address his entire drama to me. 
This was not surprising, for it would not have been 
the thing for him to single out the young motherl- 
and the other man in the orchestra stalls seemed a 
vague and inexperienced youth, whom he would hard- 
ly have given the preference over me. I felt the com- 
pliment, but upon the whole it embarrassed me ; it was 
too intimate, and it gave me a publicity I would will- 
ingly have foregone. I did what I could to reject it, 
by feigning an indifference to his jokes; I even frowned 

196 



AT A DIME MUSEUM 

a measure of disapproval; but this merely stimulated 
his ambition. He was really a merry creature, and 
when he had got off a number of very good things 
which were received in perfect silence, and looked over 
his audience with a woe-begone eye, and said, with 
an effect of delicate apology, 'I hope I'm not disturb- 
ing you any/ I broke down and laughed, and that 
delivered me into his hand. He immediately said 
to me that now he would tell me about a friend of his, 
who had a pretty large family, eight of them living, 
and one in Philadelphia; and then for no reason he 
seemed to change his mind, and said he would sing 
me a song written expressly for him — by an express- 
man; and he went on from one wild gayety to an- 
other, until he had worked his audience up to quite a 
frenzy of enthusiasm, and almost had a recall when 
he went off. 

" I was rather glad to be rid of him, and I was glad 
that the next performers, who were a lady and a gen- 
tleman contortionist of Spanish- American extraction, 
behaved more impartially. They were really remark- 
able artists in their way, and though it's a pain- 
ful way, I couldn't help admiring their gift in bow- 
knots and other difficult poses. The gentleman got 
abundant applause, but the lady at first got none. I 
think perhaps it was because, with the correct feeling 
that prevailed among us, we could not see a lady con- 
tort herself with so much approval as a gentleman, 
and that there was a wound to our sense of propriety 
in witnessing her skill. But I could see that the poor 
girl was hurt in her artist pride by our severity, and 
at the next thing she did I led off the applause with 
my umbrella. She instantly lighted up with a joy- 
ful smile, and the young mother in the orchestra leaned 
forward to nod her sympathy to me while she clapped. 
We were fast becoming a domestic circle, and it was 

197 



LITERATURE AND LIFE 

very pleasant, but I thought that upon the whole I 
had better go." 

"And do you think you had a profitable hour at 
that show?" I asked, with a smile that was meant to 
be sceptical. 

"Profitable?" said my friend. "I said agreeable. 
I don't know about the profit. But it was very good 
variety, and it was very cheap. I understand that 
this is the kind of thing you want the two-dollar the- 
atre to come down to, or up to." 

"Not exactly, or not quite," I returned, thought- 
fully, "though I must say I think your time was as 
well spent as it would have been at most of the plays 
I have seen this winter." 

My friend left the point, and said, with a dreamy 
air: "It was all very pathetic, in a way. Three out 
of those five people were really clever, and certainly 
artists. That colored brother was almost a genius, 
a very common variety of genius, but still a genius, 
with a gift for his calling that couldn't be disputed. 
He was a genuine humorist, and I sorrowed over him 
— after I got safely away from his intimacy — as I 
should over some author who was struggling along 
without winning his public. Why not? One is as 
much in the show business as the other. There is 
a difference of quality rather than of kind. Perhaps 
by-and-by my colored humorist will make a strike 
with his branch of the public, as you are always hop- 
ing to do with yours." 

"You don't think you're making yourself rather 
offensive?" I suggested. 

"Not intentionally. Aren't the arts one? How 
can you say that any art is higher than the others? 
Why is it nobler to contort the mind than to contort 
the body?" 

"I am always saying that it is not at all noble to 

198 



AT A DIME MUSEUM 

contort the mind," I returned, "and I feel that to aim 
at nothing higher than the amusement of 3 T our readers 
is to bring yourself most distinctly to the level of the 
show business/' 

"Yes, I know that is your pose/' said my friend. 
"And I dare say you really think that you make a 
distinction in facts when you make a distinction in 
terms. If you don't amuse your readers, you don't 
keep them; practically, you cease to exist. You may 
call it interesting them, if you like; but, really, what 
is the difference? You do your little act, and because 
the stage is large and the house is fine, you fancy you 
are not of that sad brotherhood which aims to please 
in humbler places, with perhaps cruder means — " 

"I don't know whether I like your saws less than 
your instances, or your instances less than your saws," 
I broke in. "Have you been at the circus yet?" 



II 

"Yet?" demanded my friend. "I went the first 
night, and I have been a good deal interested in the 
examination of my emotions ever since. I can't find 
out just why I have so much pleasure in the trapeze. 
Half the time I want to shut my eyes, and a good part 
of the time I do look away; but I wouldn't spare any 
actor the most dangerous feat. One of the poor girls, 
that night, dropped awkwardly into the net after her 
performance, and limped off to the dressing-room with 
a sprained ankle. It made me rather sad to think that 
now she must perhaps give up her perilous work for 
a while, and pay a doctor, and lose her salary, but 
it didn't take away my interest in the other trapezists 
flying through the air above another net. 

"If I had honestly complained of anything it would 

199 



LITERATURE AND LIFE 

have been of the superfluity which glutted rather than 
fed me. How can you watch three sets of trapezists 
at once? You really see neither well It's the same 
with the three rings. There should be one ring, and 
each act should have a fair chance with the spectator, 
if it took six hours; I would willingly give the time. 
Fancy three stages at the theatre, with three plays 
going on at once!" 

"No, don't fancy that!" I entreated. "One play is 
bad enough." 

"Or fancy reading three novels simultaneously, 
and listening at the same time to a lecture and a ser- 
mon, which could represent the two platforms between 
the rings," my friend calmly persisted. "The three 
rings are an abuse and an outrage, but I don't know 
but I object still more to the silencing of the clowns. 
They have a great many clowns now, but they are 
all dumb, and you only get half the good you used to 
get out of the single clown of the old one-ring circus. 
Why, it's as if the literary humorist were to lead up 
to a charming conceit or a subtle jest, and then put 
asterisks where the humor ought to come in." 

" Don't you think you are going from bad to worse?" 
I asked. 

My friend went on: "I'm afraid the circus is spoiled 
for me. It has become too much of a good thing; for 
it is a good thing ; almost the best thing in the way of 
an entertainment that there is. I'm still very fond 
of it, but I come away defeated and defrauded because 
I have been embarrassed with riches, and have been 
given more than I was able to grasp. My greed has 
been overfed. I think I must keep to those entertain- 
ments where you can come at ten in the morning and 
stay till ten at night, with a perpetual change of bill, 
only one stage, and no fall of the curtain. I suppose 
you would object to them because they're getting rather 

200 



AT A DIME MUSEUM 

dear; at the best of them now they ask you a dollar 
for the first seats." 

I said that I did not think this too much for twelve 
hours, if the intellectual character of the entertain- 
ment was correspondingly high. 

"It's as high as that of some magazines/' said my 
friend, " though I could sometimes wish it were higher. 
It's like the matter in the Sunday papers — about that 
average. Some of it's good, and most of it isn't. Some 
of it could hardly be worse. But there is a great deal 
of it, and you get it consecutively and not simultane- 
ously. That constitutes its advantage over the cir- 
cus." 

My friend stopped, with a vague smile, and I asked : 
"Then, do I understand that you would advise me 
to recommend the dime museums, the circus, and 
the perpetual-motion varieties in the place of the the- 
atres?" 

"You have recommended books instead, and that 
notion doesn't seem to have met with much favor, 
though you urged their comparative cheapness. Now, 
why not suggest something that is really level with 
the popular taste?" 



AMERICAN LITERATURE IN EXILE 

A RECENTLY lecturing Englishman is reported 
to have noted the unenviable primacy of the 
United States among countries where the struggle 
for material prosperity has been disastrous to the pur- 
suit of literature. He said, or is said to have said 
(one cannot be too careful in attributing to a public 
man the thoughts that may be really due to an im- 
aginative frame in the reporter), that among us, "the 
old race of writers of distinction, such as Longfellow, 
Bryant, Holmes, and Washington Irving, have (sic) 
died out, and the Americans who are most prominent 
in cultivated European opinion in art or literature, 
like Sargent, Henry James, or Marion Crawford, live 
habitually out of America, and draw their inspiration 
from England, France, and Italy." 



If this were true, I confess that I am so indifferent 
to what many Americans glory in that it would not 
distress me, or wound me in the sort of self-love which 
calls itself patriotism. If it would at all help to put 
an end to that struggle for material prosperity which 
has eventuated with us in so many millionaires and 
so many tramps, I should be glad to believe that it was 
driving our literary men out of the country. This 
would be a tremendous object-lesson, and might be a 

202 



AMERICAN LITERATURE IN EXILE 

warning to the millionaires and the tramps. But I 
am afraid it would not have this effect, for neither 
our very rich nor our very poor care at all for the state 
of polite learning among us; though for the matter 
of that, I believe that economic conditions have little 
to do with it ; and that if a general mediocrity of fort- 
une prevailed and there were no haste to be rich and 
to get poor, the state of polite learning would not be 
considerably affected. As matters stand, I think we 
may reasonably ask whether the Americans "most 
prominent in cultivated European opinion/ ' the Amer- 
icans who "live habitually out of America/' are not 
less exiles than advance agents of the expansion now 
advertising itself to the world. They may be the 
vanguard of the great army of adventurers destined 
to overrun the earth from these shores, and exploit 
all foreign countries to our advantage. They proba- 
bly themselves do not know it, but in the act of " draw- 
ing their inspiration " from alien scenes, or taking 
their own where they find it, are not they simply trans- 
porting to Europe "the struggle for material prosper- 
ity " which Sir Lepel supposes to be fatal to them here? 
There is a question, however, which comes before 
this, and that is the question whether they have quitted 
us in such numbers as justly to alarm our patriotism. 
Qualitatively, in the authors named and in the late Mr. 
Bret Harte, Mr. Harry Harland, and the late Mr. Harold 
Frederic, as well as in Mark Twain, once temporarily 
resident abroad, the defection is very great ; but quan- 
titatively it is not such as to leave us without a fair 
measure of home-keeping authorship. Our destitution 
is not nearly so great now in the absence of Mr. James 
and Mr. Crawford as it was in the times before the 
"struggle for material prosperity" when Washington 
Irving wen* and lived in England and on the Euro- 
pean continent wellnigh half his life. 

203 



LITERATURE AND LIFE 

Sir Lepel Griffin — or Sir Lepel Griffin's reporter — 
seems to forget the fact of Irving's long absenteeism 
when he classes him with "the old race" of eminent 
American authors who stayed at home. But really 
none of those he names were so constant to our air as 
he seems — or his reporter seems — to think. Longfellow 
sojourned three or four years in Germany, Spain, and 
Italy; Holmes spent as great time in Paris; Bryant 
was a frequent traveller, and each of them "drew his 
inspiration " now and then from alien sources. Lowell 
was many years in Italy, Spain, and England; Mot- 
ley spent more than half his life abroad; Hawthorne 
was away from us nearly a decade. 



II 

If I seem to be proving too much in one way, I do 
not feel that I am proving too much in another. My 
facts go to show that the literary spirit is the true world- 
citizen, and is at home everywhere. If any good Amer- 
ican were distressed by the absenteeism of our authors, 
I should first advise him that American literature was 
not derived from the folk-lore of the red Indians, but 
was, as I have said once before, a condition of English 
literature, and was independent even of our indepen- 
dence. Then I should entreat him to consider the case 
of foreign authors who had found it more comfortable 
or more profitable to live out of their respective coun- 
tries than in them. I should allege for his consolation 
the case of Byron, Shelley, and Leigh Hunt, and more 
latterly that of the Brownings and Walter Savage 
Landor, who preferred an Italian to an English so- 
journ; and yet more recently that of Mr. Rudyard 
Kipling, who voluntarily lived several years in Ver- 
mont, and has "drawn his inspiration" in notable 

204 



AMERICAN LITERATURE IN EXILE 

instances from the life of these States. It will serve 
him also to consider that the two greatest Norwegian 
authors, Bjornsen and Ibsen, have both lived long in 
France and Italy. Heinrich Heine loved to live in 
Paris much better than in Dusseldorf, or even in Ham- 
burg; and Tourguenief himself, who said that any 
man's country could get on without him, but no man 
could get on without his country, managed to dis- 
pense with his own in the French capital, and died 
there after he was quite free to go back to St. Peters- 
burg. In the last century Rousseau lived in France 
rather than Switzerland ; Voltaire at least tried to live 
in Prussia, and was obliged to a long exile elsewhere ; 
Goldoni left fame and friends in Venice for the favor 
of princes in Paris. 

Literary absenteeism, it seems to me, is not pecul- 
iarly an American vice or an American virtue. It is 
an expression and a proof of the modern sense which 
enlarges one's country to the bounds of civilization. 
I cannot think it justly a reproach in the eyes of the 
world, and if any American feels it a grievance, I sug- 
gest that he do what he can to have embodied in the 
platform of his party a plank affirming the right of 
American authors to a public provision that will en- 
able them to live as agreeably at home as they can 
abroad on the same money. In the mean time, their 
absenteeism is not a consequence of "the struggle 
for material prosperity," not a high disdain of the strife 
which goes on not less in Europe than in America, 
and must, of course, go on everywhere as long as 
competitive conditions endure, but is the result of 
chances and preferences which mean nothing nation- 
ally calamitous or discreditable. 



THE HORSE SHOW 

"AS good as the circus — not so good as the circus — 
r\ better than the circus." These were my vary- 
ing impressions, as I sat looking down upon the tan- 
bark, the other day, at the Horse Show in Madison 
Square Garden ; and I came away with their blend for 
my final opinion. 



I might think that the Horse Show (which is so 
largely a Man Show and a Woman Show) was better 
or worse than the circus, or about as good ; but I could 
not get away from the circus, in my impression of it. 
Perhaps the circus is the norm of all splendors where 
the horse and his master are joined for an effect upon 
the imagination of the spectator. I am sure that I 
have never been able quite to dissociate from it the 
picturesqueness of chivalry, and that it will hereafter 
always suggest to me the last correctness of fashion. 
It is through the horse that these far extremes meet; 
in all times the horse has been the supreme expression 
of aristocracy; and it may very well be that a dream 
of the elder world prophesied the ultimate type of the 
future, when the Swell shall have evolved into the 
Centaur. 

Some such teasing notion of their mystical affinity 
is what haunts you as you make your round of the 
vast ellipse, with the well-groomed men about you and 
the well-groomed horses beyond the barrier. 

206 



THE HORSE SHOW 

In this first affair of the new-comer, the horses 
are not so much on show as the swells ; you get only- 
glimpses of shining coats and tossing manes, with 
a glint here and there of a flying hoof through the 
lines of people coming and going, and the ranks of 
people, three or four feet deep, against the rails of the 
ellipse; but the swells are there in perfect relief, and 
it is they who finally embody the Horse Show to you. 
The fact is that they are there to see, of course, but 
the effect is that they are there to be seen. 

The whole spectacle had an historical quality, which 
I tasted with pleasure. It was the thing that had 
eventuated in every civilization, and the American 
might feel a characteristic pride that what came to 
Rome in five hundred years had come to America in 
a single century. There was something fine in the 
absolutely fatal nature of the result, and I perceived 
that nowhere else in our life, which is apt to be seclu- 
sive in its exclusiveness, is the prime motive at work 
in it so dramatically apparent. "Yes," I found my- 
self thinking, "this is what it all comes to: the subiti 
guadagni of the new rich, made in large masses and 
seeking a swift and eager exploitation, and the slowly 
accumulated fortunes, put together from sparing and 
scrimping, from slaving and enslaving, in former 
times, and now in the stainless white hands of the 
second or third generation, they both meet here to the 
purpose of a common ostentation, and create a Horse 
Show." 

I cannot say that its creators looked much as if they 
liked it, now they had got it ; and, so far as I have been 
able to observe them, people of wealth and fashion al- 
ways dissemble their joy, and have the air of being 
bored in the midst of their amusements. This re- 
serve of rapture may be their delicacy, their unwill- 
ingness to awaken envy in the less prospered; and I 

207 



LITERATURE AND LIFE 

should not have objected to the swells at the Horse 
Show looking dreary if they had looked more like 
swells; except for a certain hardness of the counte- 
nance (which I found my own sympathetically taking 
on) I should not have thought them very patrician, 
and this hardness may have been merely the conse- 
quence of being so much stared at. Perhaps, indeed, 
they were not swells whom I saw in the boxes, but 
only companies of ordinary people who had clubbed 
together and hired their boxes ; I understand that this 
can be done, and the student of civilization so far mis- 
led. But certainly if they were swells they did not look 
quite up to themselves ; though, for that matter, neither 
do the nobilities of foreign countries, and on one or 
two occasions when I have seen them, kings and em- 
perors have failed me in like manner. They have all 
wanted that indescribable something which I have 
found so satisfying in aristocracies and royalties on 
the stage; and here at the Horse Show, while I made 
my tour, I constantly met handsome, actor-like folk 
on foot who could much better have taken the r61e of 
the people in the boxes. The promenaders may not 
have been actors at all ; they may have been the real 
thing for which I was in vain scanning the boxes, 
but they looked like actors, who indeed set an exam- 
ple to us all in personal beauty and in correctness of 
dress. 

I mean nothing offensive either to swells or to actors. 
We have not distinction, as a people ; Matthew Arnold 
noted that ; and it is not our business to have it. When 
it is our business our swells will have it, just as our 
actors now have it, especially our actors of English 
birth. I had not this reflection about me at the time 
to console me for my disappointment, and it only now 
occurs to me that what I took for an absence of distinc- 
tion may have been such a universal prevalence of it 

208 




THE EFFECT IS THAT THEY ARE THERE TO BE SEEN 



THE HORSE SHOW 

that the result was necessarily a species of indistinc- 
tion. But in the complexion of any social assembly 
we Americans are at a disadvantage with Europeans 
from the want of uniforms. A few military scattered 
about in those boxes, or even a few sporting bishops in 
shovel-hats and aprons, would have done much to re- 
lieve them from the reproach 1 have been heaping 
upon them. Our women, indeed, poor things, always 
do their duty in personal splendor, and it is not of a 
poverty in their modes at the Horse Show that I am 
complaining. If the men had borne their part as 
well, there would not have been these tears; and yet, 
what am I saying? There was here and there a clean- 
shaven face (which I will not believe was always an 
actor's), and here and there a figure superbly set up, 
and so faultlessly appointed as to shoes, trousers, 
coat, tie, hat, and gloves as to have a salience from 
the mass of good looks and good clothes which I will 
not at last call less than distinction. 



II 

At any rate, I missed these marked presences when 
I left the lines of the promenaders around the ellipse, 
and climbed to a seat some tiers above the boxes. I 
am rather anxious to have it known that my seat was 
not one of those cheap ones in the upper gallery, but 
was with the virtuous poor who could afford to pay a 
dollar and a half for their tickets. I bought it of a 
speculator on the sidewalk, who said it was his last, 
so that I conceived it the last in the house ; but I found 
the chairs by no means all filled, though it was as 
good an audience as I have sometimes seen in the 
same place at other circuses. The people about me 
were such as I had noted at the other circuses, hotel- 
«4 209 



LITERATURE AND LIFE 

sojourners, kindly - looking comers from provincial 
towns and cities, whom I instantly felt myself at home 
with, and free to put off that gloomy severity of as- 
pect which had grown upon me during my association 
with the swells below. My neighbors were sufficiently 
well dressed, and if they had no more distinction than 
their betters, or their richers, they had not the burden 
of the occasion upon them, and seemed really glad of 
what was going on in the ring. 

There again I was sensible of the vast advantage of 
costume. The bugler who stood up at one end of the 
central platform and blew a fine fanfare (I hope it was 
a fanfare) towards the gates where the horses were to 
enter from their stalls in the basement was a hussar- 
like shape that filled my romantic soul with joy; and 
the other figures of the management I thought very 
fortunate compromises between grooms and ring- 
masters. At any rate, their nondescript costumes 
were gay, and a relief from the fashions in the boxes 
and the promenade; they were costumes, and cos- 
tumes are always more sincere, if not more effective, 
than fashions. As I have hinted, I do not know just 
what costumes they were, but they took the light well 
from the girandole far aloof and from the thousands 
of little electric bulbs that beaded the roof in long lines, 
and dispersed the sullenness of the dull, rainy after- 
noon. When the knights entered the lists on the seats 
of their dog-carts, with their squires beside them, and 
their shining tandems before them, they took the light 
well, too, and the spectacle was so brilliant that I trust 
my imagery may be forgiven a novelist pining for 
the pageantries of the past. I do not know to this 
moment whether these knights were bona fide gentle- 
men, or only their deputies, driving their tandems for 
them, and I am equally at a loss to account for the 
variety of their hats. Some wore tall, shining silk 

210 



THE HORSE SHOW 

hats; some flat-topped, brown derbys; some simple 
black pot-hats; — and. is there, then, no rigor as to the 
head -gear of people driving tandems? I felt that 
there ought to be, and that there ought to be some rule 
as to where the number of each tandem should be dis- 
played. As it was, this was sometimes carelessly 
stuck into the seat of the cart; sometimes it was worn 
at the back of the groom's waist, and sometimes full 
upon his stomach. In the last position it gave a touch 
of burlesque which wounded me; for these are vital 
matters, and I found myself very exacting in them. 

With the horses themselves I could find no fault 
upon the grounds of my censure of the show in some 
other ways. They had distinction; they were patri- 
cian; they were swell. They felt it, they showed it, 
they rejoiced in it; and the most reluctant observer 
could not deny them the glory of blood, of birth, which 
the thoroughbred horse has expressed in all lands and 
ages. Their lordly port was a thing that no one could 
dispute, and for an aristocracy I suppose that they 
had a high average of intelligence, though there might 
be two minds about this. They made me think of 
mettled youths and haughty dames; they abashed 
the humble spirit of the beholder with the pride of their 
high - stepping, their curvetting and caracoling, as 
they jingled in their shining harness around the long 
ring. Their noble uselessness took the fancy, for I 
suppose that there is nothing so superbly superfluous 
as a tandem, outside or inside of the best society. It 
is something which only the ambition of wealth and 
unbroken leisure can mount to ; and I was glad that the 
display of tandems was the first event of the Horse 
Show which I witnessed, for it seemed to me that it 
must beyond all others typify the power which created 
the Horse Show. I wished that the human side of 
it could have been more unquestionably adequate, 

211 



LITERATURE AND LIFE 

but the equine side of the event was perfect. Still, I 
felt a certain relief, as in something innocent and sim- 
ple and childlike, in the next event. 



Ill 

This was the inundation of the tan-bark with troops 
of pretty Shetland ponies of all ages, sizes, and colors. 
A cry of delight went up from a group of little people 
near me, and the spell of the Horse Show was broken. 
It was no longer a solemnity of fashion, it was a sweet 
and kindly pleasure which every one could share, or 
every one who had ever had, or ever wished to have, 
a Shetland pony; the touch of nature made the whole 
show kin. I could not see that the freakish, kittenish 
creatures did anything to claim our admiration, but 
they won our affection by every trait of ponyish ca- 
price and obstinacy. The small colts broke away 
from the small mares, and gambolled over the tan- 
bark in wanton groups, with gay or plaintive whinny- 
ings, which might well have touched a responsive 
chord in the bosom of fashion itself; I dare say it is 
not so hard as it looks. The scene remanded us to a 
moment of childhood; and I found myself so fond of 
all the ponies that I felt it invidious of the judges to 
choose among them for the prizes; they ought every 
one to have had the prize. 

I suppose a Shetland pony is not a very useful ani- 
mal in our conditions ; no doubt a good, tough, stubbed 
donkey would be worth all their tribe when it came 
down to hard work ; but we cannot all be hard-working 
donkeys, and some of us may be toys and playthings 
without too great reproach. I gazed after the broken, 
refluent wave of these amiable creatures, with the 
vague toleration here formulated, but I was not quite 

2T2 



THE HORSE SHOW 

at peace in it, or fully consoled in my habitual ethicism 
till the next event brought the hunters with their high- 
jumping into the ring. These noble animals unite 
use and beauty in such measure that the censor must 
be of Catonian severity who can refuse them his praise. 
When I reflected that by them and their devoted riders 
our civilization had been assimilated to that of the 
mother-country in its finest expression, and another 
tie added to those that bind us to her through the lan- 
guage of Shakespeare and Milton ; that they had tamed 
the haughty spirit of the American farmer in several 
parts of the country so that he submitted for a con- 
sideration to have his crops ridden over, and that they 
had all but exterminated the ferocious anise-seed bag, 
once so common and destructive among us, I was in 
a fit mood to welcome the bars and hurdles which were 
now set up at four or five places for the purposes of the 
high- jumping. 

As to the beauty of the hunting-horse, though, I 
think I must hedge a little, while I stand firmly to 
my admiration of his use. To be honest, the tandem 
horse is more to my taste. He is better shaped, and he 
bears himself more proudly. The hunter is apt to 
behave, whatever his reserve of intelligence, like an 
excited hen ; he is apt to be ewe- necked and bred away 
to nothing where the ideal horse abounds ; he has the 
behavior of a turkey-hen when not behaving like the 
common or garden hen. But there can be no ques- 
tion of his jumping, which seems to be his chief busi- 
ness in a world where we are all appointed our several 
duties, and I at once began to take a vivid pleasure in 
his proficiency. I have always felt a blind and in- 
sensate joy in running races, which has no relation 
to any particular horse, and I now experienced an im- 
partial rapture in the performances of these hunters. 
They looked very much alike, and if it had not been 

213 



LITERATURE AND LIFE 

for the changing numbers on the sign-board in the 
centre of the ring announcing that 650, 675, or 602 
was now jumping, I might have thought it was 650 
all the time. 

A high jump is not so fine a sight as a running race 
when the horses have got half a mile away and look 
like a covey of swift birds, but it is still a fine sight. 
I became very fastidious as to which moment of it was 
the finest, whether when the horse rose in profile, or 
when his aerial hoof touched the ground (with the 
effect of half jerking his rider's head half off), or when 
he showed a flying heel in perspective; and I do not 
know to this hour which I prefer. But I suppose I 
was becoming gradually spoiled by my pleasure, for 
as time went on I noticed that I was not satisfied with 
the monotonous excellence of the horses' execution. 
Will it be credited that I became willing something 
should happen, anything, to vary it? I asked myself 
why, if some of the more exciting incidents of the hunt- 
ing-field which I had read of must befall, 1 should not 
see them. Several of the horses had balked at the 
barriers, and almost thrown their riders across them 
over their necks, but not quite done it; several had 
carried away the green- tufted top rail with their heels ; 
when suddenly there came a loud clatter from the 
farther side of the ellipse, where a whole panel of fence 
had gone down. I looked eagerly for the prostrate 
horse and rider under the bars, but they were canter- 
ing safely away 

IV 

It was enough, however. I perceived that I was 
becoming demoralized, and that if I were to write of 
the Horse Show with at all the superiority one likes 
to feel towards the rich and great, I had better come 

214 



THE HORSE SHOW 

away. But I came away critical, even in my down- 
fall, and feeling that, circus for circus, the Greatest 
Show on Earth which I had often seen in that place 
had certain distinct advantages of the Horse Show. 
It had three rings and two platforms ; and, for another 
thing, the drivers and riders in the races, when they 
won, bore the banner of victory aloft in their hands, 
instead of poorly letting a blue or red ribbon flicker at 
their horses' ears. The events were more frequent 
and rapid; the costumes infinitely more varied and 
picturesque. As for the people in the boxes, I do not 
know that they were less distinguished than these at 
the Horse Show, but if they were not of the same high 
level in which distinction was impossible, they did 
not show it in their looks. 

The Horse Show, in fine, struck me as a circus of 
not all the first qualities; and I had moments of sus- 
pecting that it was no more than the evolution of the 
county cattle show. But in any case I had to own 
that its great success was quite legitimate; for the 
horse, upon the whole, appeals to a wider range of 
humanity, vertically as well as horizontally, than 
any other interest, not excepting politics or religion. 
I cannot, indeed, regard him as a civilizing influence ; 
but then we cannot be always civilizing. 



THE PROBLEM OF THE SUMMER 

IT has sometimes seemed to me that the solution of 
the problem how and where to spend the summer 
was simplest with those who were obliged to spend it 
as the}^ spent the winter, and increasingly difficult in 
the proportion of one's ability to spend it wherever 
and however one chose. Few are absolutely released 
to this choice, however, and those few are greatly to 
be pitied. I know that they are often envied and hated 
for it by those who have no such choice, but that is a 
pathetic mistake. If we could look into their hearts, 
indeed, we should witness there so much misery that 
we should wish rather to weep over them than to re- 
proach them with their better fortune, or what ap- 
peared so. 

I 

For most people choice is a curse, and it is this curse 
that the summer brings upon great numbers who 
would not perhaps otherwise be afflicted. They are 
not in the happy case of those who must stay at home ; 
their hard necessity is that they can go away, and try 
to be more agreeably placed somewhere else; but al- 
though I say they are in great numbers, they are an 
infinitesimal minority of the whole bulk of our popu- 
lation. Their bane is not, in its highest form, that 
of the average American who has no choice of the 
kind; and when one begins to speak of the summer 

216 



THE PROBLEM OF THE SUMMER 

problem, one must begin at once to distinguish. It 
is the problem of the East rather than of the West 
(where people are much more in the habit of staying 
at home the year round), and it is the problem of the 
city and not of the country. 1 am not sure that there 
is one practical farmer in the whole United States 
who is obliged to witness in his household those sad 
dissensions which almost separate the families of pro- 
fessional men as to where and how they shall pass the 
summer. People of this class, which is a class with 
some measure of money, ease, and taste, are common- 
ly of varying and decided minds, and I once knew a 
family of the sort whose combined ideal for their sum- 
mer outing was summed up in the simple desire for 
society and solitude, mountain- air and sea-bathing. 
They spent the whole months of April, May, and June 
in a futile inquiry for a resort uniting these attrac- 
tions, and on the first of July they drove to the station 
with no definite point in view. But they found that 
they could get return tickets for a certain place on an 
inland lake at a low figure, and they took the first 
train for it. There they decided next morning to 
push on to the mountains, and sent their baggage to 
the station, but before it was checked they changed 
their minds, and remained two weeks where they were. 
Then they took train for a place on the coast, but in 
the cars a friend told them they ought to go to another 
place; they decided to go there, but before arriving at 
the junction they decided again to keep on. They 
arrived at their original destination, and the follow- 
ing day telegraphed for rooms at a hotel farther down 
the coast. The answer came that there were no rooms, 
and being by this time ready to start, they started, 
and in due time reported themselves at the hotel. The 
landlord saw that something must be done, and he 
got them rooms, at a smaller house, and mealed them 

217 



LITERATURE AND LIFE 

(as it used to be called at Mt. Desert) in his own. But 
upon experiment of the fare at the smaller house they 
liked it so well that they resolved to live there alto- 
gether, and they spent a summer of the greatest com- 
fort there, so that they would hardly come away when 
the house closed in the fall. 

This was an extreme case, and perhaps such a vent- 
ure might not always turn out so happily ; but I think 
that people might oftener trust themselves to Provi- 
dence in these matters than they do. There is really 
an infinite variety of pleasant resorts of all kinds now, 
and one could quite safely leave it to the man in the 
ticket-office where one should go, and check one's 
baggage accordingly. I think the chances of an 
agreeable summer would be as good in that way as 
in making a hard-and-fast choice of a certain place 
and sticking to it. My own experience is that in these 
things chance makes a very good choice for one, as 
it does in most non-moral things. 

II 

A joke dies hard, and I am not sure that the life is 
yet quite out of the kindly ridicule that was cast for a 
whole generation upon the people who left their com- 
fortable houses in town to starve upon farm-board 
or stifle in the narrow rooms of mountain and sea- 
side hotels. Yet such people were in the right, and 
their mockers were in the wrong, and their patient 
persistence in going out of town for the summer in 
the face of severe discouragements has multiplied 
indefinitely the kinds of summer resorts, and reformed 
them altogether. I believe the city boarding-house 
remains very much what it used to be ; but I am bound 
to say that the country boarding-house has vastly 
improved since I began to know it. As for the sum- 

218 



THE PROBLEM OF THE SUMMER 

mer hotel, by steep or by strand, it leaves little to be 
complained of except the prices. I take it for granted, 
therefore, that the out-of-town summer has come to 
stay, for all who can afford it, and that the chief sor- 
row attending it is that curse of choice, which I have 
already spoken of. 

I have rather favored chance than choice, because, 
whatever choice you make, you are pretty sure to re- 
gret it, with a bitter sense of responsibility added, 
which you cannot feel if chance has chosen for you. 
I observe that people who own summer cottages are 
often apt to wish they did not, and were foot-loose to 
roam where they listed, and I have been told that even 
a yacht is not a source of unmixed content, though so 
eminently detachable. To great numbers Europe looks 
from this shore like a safe refuge from the American 
summer problem ; and yet I am not sure that it is alto- 
gether so; for it is not enough merely to go to Europe; 
one has to choose where to go when one has got there. 
A European city is certainly always more tolerable 
than an American city, but one cannot very well pass 
the summer in Paris, or even in London. The heart 
there, as here, will yearn for some blessed seat 

" Where falls not hail, or rain, or any snow, 
Nor ever wind blows loudly; but it lies 
Deep-meadow'd, happy, fair with orchard lawns 
And bowery hollows crown'd with summer sea/' 

and still, after your keel touches the strand of that 
alluring old world, you must buy your ticket and reg- 
ister your trunk for somewhere in particular. 

Ill 

It is truly a terrible stress, this summer problem, 
and, as I say, my heart aches much more for those who 

219 



LITERATURE AND LIFE 

have to solve it and suffer the consequences of their 
choice than for those who have no choice, but must 
stay the summer through where their work is, and be 
humbly glad that they have any work to keep them 
there. I am not meaning now, of course, business 
men obliged to remain in the city to earn the bread — or, 
more correctly, the cake — of their families in the coun- 
try, or even their clerks and bookkeepers, and porters 
and messengers, but such people as I sometimes catch 
sight of from the elevated trains (in my reluctant 
midsummer flights through the city), sweltering in 
upper rooms over sewing-machines or lap-boards, or 
stewing in the breathless tenement streets, or driving 
clangorous trucks, or monotonous cars, or bending 
over wash-tubs at open windows for breaths of the 
no-air without. 

These all get on somehow, and at the end of the 
summer they have not to accuse themselves of folly 
in going to one place rather than another. Their 
fate is decided for them, and they submit to it ; whereas 
those who decide their fate are always rebelling against 
it. They it is whom I am truly sorry for, and whom I 
write of with tears in my ink. Their case is hard, and 
it will seem all the harder if we consider how foolish 
they will look and how flat they will feel at the judg- 
ment-day, when they are asked about their summer 
outings. I do not really suppose we shall be held to 
a very strict account for our pleasures because every- 
body else has not enjoyed them, too; that would be a 
pity of our lives; and yet there is an old-fashioned 
compunction which will sometimes visit the heart if 
we take our pleasures ungraciously, when so many 
have no pleasures to take. I would suggest, then, 
to those on whom the curse of choice between pleasures 
rests, that they should keep in mind those who have 
chiefly pains to their portion in life. 

220 



THE PROBLEM OF THE SUMMER 

I am not, I hope, urging my readers to any active 
benevolence, or counselling them to share their pleas- 
ures with others; it has been accurately ascertained 
that there are not pleasures enough to go round, as 
things now are; but I would seriously entreat them 
to consider whether they could not somewhat alleviate 
the hardships of their own lot at the sea-side or among 
the mountains, by contrasting it with the lot of others 
in the sweat-shops and the boiler-factories of life. I 
know very well that it is no longer considered very 
good sense or very good morality to take comfort in 
one's advantages from the disadvantages of others, 
and this is not quite what I mean to teach. Perhaps 
I mean nothing more than an overhauling of the whole 
subject of advantages and disadvantages, which would 
be a light and agreeable occupation for the leisure of 
the summer outer. It might be very interesting, and 
possibly it might be amusing, for one stretched upon 
the beach or swaying in the hammock to inquire into 
the reasons for his or her being so favored, and it is 
not beyond the bounds of expectation that a consensus 
of summer opinion on this subject would go far to en- 
lighten the world upon a question that has vexed the 
world ever since mankind was divided into those who 
work too much and those who rest too much. 



ESTHETIC NEW YORK FIFTY-ODD YEARS AGO 

A STUDY of New York civilization in 1849 has 
lately come into my hands, with a mortifying 
effect, which I should like to share with the reader, 
to my pride of modernity. I had somehow believed 
that after half a century of material prosperity, such 
as the world has never seen before, New York in 1902 
must be very different from New York in 1849, but if 
I am to trust either the impressions of the earlier stu- 
dent or my own, New York is essentially the same 
now that it was then. The spirit of the place has not 
changed ; it is as it was, splendidly and sordidly com- 
mercial. Even the body of it has undergone little or 
no alteration; it was as shapeless, as incongruous, as 
ugly when the author of Neiv York in Slices wrote as 
it is at this writing ; it has simply grown, or overgrown, 
on the moral and material lines which seem to have 
been structural in it from the beginning. He felt in 
his time the same vulgarity, the same violence, in its 
architectural anarchy that I have felt in my time, 
and he noted how all dignity and beauty perished, 
amid the warring forms, with a prescience of my own 
affliction, which deprives me of the satisfaction of a 
discoverer and leaves me merely the sense of being 
rather old-fashioned in my painful emotions. 



I wish I could pretend that my author philosophized 
the facts of his New York with something less than 

222 



^ESTHETIC NEW YORK FIFTY-ODD YEARS AGO 

the raw haste of the young journalist ; but I am afraid 
I must own that New York in Slices affects one as 
having first been printed in an evening paper, and 
that the writer brings to the study of the metropolis 
something like the eager horror of a country visitor. 
This probably enabled him to heighten the effect he 
wished to make with readers of a kindred tradition, 
and for me it adds a certain innocent charm to his 
work. I may make myself better understood if I say 
that his attitude towards the depravities of a smaller 
New York is much the same as that of Mr. Stead tow- 
ards the wickedness of a much larger Chicago. He 
seizes with some such avidity upon the darker facts 
of the prisons, the slums, the gambling- houses, the 
mock auctions, the toughs (who then called them- 
selves b'hoys and glials), the quacks, the theatres, 
and even the intelligence offices, and exploits their 
iniquities with a ready virtue which the wickedest reader 
can enjoy with him. 

But if he treated of these things alone, I should not 
perhaps have brought his curious little book to the 
polite notice of my readers. He treats also of the press, 
the drama, the art, and, above all, " the literary soirees " 
of that remote New York of his in a manner to make 
us latest New-Yorkers feel our close proximity to it. 
Fifty -odd years ago journalism had already become 
"the absorbing, remorseless, clamorous thing" we 
now know, and very different from the thing it was 
when "expresses were unheard of, and telegraphs 
were uncrystallized from the lightning's blue and fiery 
film." Reporterism was beginning to assume its 
present importance, but it had not yet become the 
paramount intellectual interest, and did not yet " stand 
shoulder to shoulder" with the counting-room in au- 
thority. Great editors, then as now, ranked great 
authors in the public esteem, or achieved a double 

223 



LITERATURE AND LIFE 

primacy by uniting journalism and literature in the 
same personality. They were often the owners as well 
as the writers of their respective papers, and they in- 
dulged for the advantage of the community the ran- 
corous rivalries, recriminations, and scurrilities which 
often form the charm, if not the chief use, of our contem- 
poraneous journals. Apparently, however, notarially 
authenticated boasts of circulation had not yet been 
made the delight of their readers, and the press had 
not become the detective agency that it now is, nor the 
organizer and distributer of charities. 

But as dark a cloud of doubt rested upon its 
relations to the theatre as still eclipses the popular 
faith in dramatic criticism. "How can you expect/' 
our author asks, "a frank and unbiassed criticism 
upon the performance of George Frederick Cooke 
Snooks . . . when the editor or reporter who is to write 
it has just been supping on beefsteak and stewed 
potatoes at Windust's, and regaling himself on brandy- 
and-water cold, without, at the expense of the afore- 
said George Frederick Cooke Snooks?" The severest 
censor of the press, however, would hardly declare 
now that "as to such a thing as impartial and inde- 
pendent criticism upon theatres in the present state 
of the relations between editors, reporters, managers, 
actors — and actresses — the thing is palpably out of 
the question/' and if matters were really at the pass 
hinted, the press has certainly improved in fifty years, 
if one may judge from its present frank condemna- 
tions of plays and players. The theatre apparently 
has not, for we read that at that period " a very great 
majority of the standard plays and farces on the stage 
depend mostly for their piquancy and their power of 
interesting an audience upon intrigues with married 
women, elopements, seductions, bribery, cheating, and 
fraud of every description. . . . Stage costume, too, 

224 



AESTHETIC NEW YORK FIFTY- ODD YEARS AGO 

wherever there is half a chance, is usually made as 
lascivious and immodest as possible; and a freedom 
and impropriety prevails among the characters of the 
piece which would be kicked out of private society 
the instant it would have the audacity to make its 
appearance there." 

II 

I hope private society in New York would still be 
found as correct if not quite so violent; and I wish I 
could believe that the fine arts were presently in as 
flourishing a condition among us as they were in 1849. 
That was the prosperous day of the Art Unions, in 
which the artists clubbed their output, and the sub- 
scribers parted the works among themselves by some- 
thing so very like raffling that the Art Unions were 
finally suppressed under the law against lotteries. 
While they lasted, however, they had exhibitions 
thronged by our wealth, fashion, and intellect (to 
name them in the order they hold the New York mind), 
as our private views now are, or ought to be; and the 
author "devotes an entire number" of his series "to 
a single institution — fearless of being accused of par- 
tiality by any who rightly appreciate the influences 
of the fine arts upon the morals and refinement of 
mankind. " 

He devotes even more than an entire number to lit- 
erature ; for, besides treating of various literary celeb- 
rities at the "literary soirees," he imagines encoun- 
tering several of them at the high-class restaurants. 
At Delmonico's, where if you had " French and money " 
you could get in that day " a dinner which, as a work 
of art, ranks with a picture by Huntington, a poem 
by Willis, or a statue by Powers," he meets such a 
musical critic as Richard Grant White, such an in- 
15 225 



LITERATURE AND LIFE 

tellectual epicurean as N. P. Willis, such a lyric poet 
as Charles Fenno Hoffman. But it would be a warm 
day for Delmonico's when the observer in this epoch 
could chance upon so much genius at its tables, per- 
haps because genius among us has no longer the 
French or the money. Indeed, the author of New 
York in Slices seems finally to think that he has gone 
too far, even for his own period, and brings himself 
up with the qualifying reservation that if Willis and 
Hoffman never did dine together at Delmonico's, they 
ought to have done so. He has apparently no mis- 
givings as to the famous musical critic, and he has no 
scruple in assembling for us at his "literary soireV 
a dozen distinguished - looking men and " twice as 
many women . . . listening to a tall, deaconly man, 
who stands between two candles held by a couple of 
sticks summoned from the recesses of the back par- 
lor, reading a basketful of gilt-edged notes. It is . . . 
the annual Valentine Party, to which all the male 
and female authors have contributed for the purpose 
of saying on paper charming things of each other, 
and at which, for a few hours, all are gratified with 
the full meed of that praise which a cold world is chary 
of bestowing upon its literary cobweb-spinners/' 

It must be owned that we have no longer anything 
so like a salon as this. It is, indeed, rather terrible, 
and it is of a quality in its celebrities which may well 
carry dismay to any among us presently intending 
immortality. Shall we, one day, we who are now in 
the rich and full enjoyment of our far-reaching fame, 
affect the imagination of posterity as these phantoms 
of the past affect ours? Shall we, too, appear in some 
pale limbo of unimportance as thin and faded as " John 
Inman, the getter-up of innumerable things for the 
annuals and magazines/' or as Dr. Rufus Griswold, 
supposed for picturesque purposes to be "stalking 

226 



^ESTHETIC NEW YORK FIFTY- ODD YEARS AGO 

about with an immense quarto volume under his arm 
... an early copy of his forthcoming Female Poets 
of America " ; or as Lewis Gaylord Clark, the " sunny- 
faced, smiling" editor of the Knickerbocker Maga- 
zine, "who don't look as if the Ink-Fiend had ever 
heard of him/' as he stands up to dance a polka with 
"a demure lady who has evidently spilled the ink- 
stand over her dress"; or as "the stately Mrs. Seba 
Smith, bending aristocratically over the centre-table, 
and talking in a bright, cold, steady stream, like an 
antique fountain by moonlight"; or as "the spiritual 
and dainty Fanny Osgood, clapping her hands and 
crowing like a baby," where she sits "nestled under 
a shawl of heraldic devices, like a bird escaped from 
its cage " ; or as Margaret Fuller, " her large, gray 
eyes lamping inspiration, and her thin, quivering 
lip prophesying like a Pythoness"? 

I hope not; I earnestly hope not. Whatever I said 
at the outset, affirming the persistent equality of New 
York characteristics and circumstances, I wish to take 
back at this point ; and I wish to warn malign foreign 
observers, of the sort who have so often refused to see 
us as we see ourselves, that they must not expect to 
find us now grouped in the taste of 1849. Possibly 
it was not so much the taste of 1849 as the author of 
New York in Slices would have us believe; and per- 
haps any one who trusted his pictures of life among 
us otherwise would be deceived by a parity of the spirit 
in which they are portrayed with that of our modern 
"society journalism." 



FROM NEW YORK INTO NEW ENGLAND 

THERE is, of course, almost a world's difference 
between England and the Continent anywhere; 
but I do not recall just now any transition between 
Continental countries which involves a more distinct 
change in the superficial aspect of things than the pas- 
sage from the Middle States into New England. It is 
all American, but American of diverse ideals ; and you 
are hardly over the border before you are sensible of 
diverse effects, which are the more apparent to you 
the more American you are. If you want the con- 
trast at its sharpest you had better leave New York 
on a Sound boat; for then you sleep out of the Middle 
State civilization and wake into the civilization of 
New England, which seems to give its stamp to nature 
herself. As to man, he takes it whether native or 
alien; and if he is foreign-born it marks him another 
Irishman, Italian, Canadian, Jew, or negro from his 
brother in any other part of the United States. 



When you have a theory of any kind, proofs of it are 
apt to seek you out, and I, who am rather fond of my 
faith in New England's influence of this sort, had as 
pretty an instance of it the day after my arrival as I 
could wish. A colored brother of Massachusetts birth, 
as black as a man can well be, and of a merely an- 

228 



FROM NEW YORK INTO NEW ENGLAND 

thropoidal profile, was driving me along shore in search 
of a sea-side hotel when we came upon a weak-minded 
young chicken in the road. The natural expecta- 
tion is that any chicken in these circumstances will 
wait for your vehicle, and then fly up before it with a 
loud screech; but this chicken may have been over- 
come by the heat (it was a land breeze and it drew like 
the breath of a furnace over the hay-cocks and the 
clover), or it may have mistimed the wheel, which 
passed over its head and left it to flop a moment in the 
dust and then fall still. The poor little tragedy was 
sufficiently distressful to me, but I bore it well, com- 
pared with my driver. He could hardly stop lamenting 
it; and when presently we met a young farmer, he 
pulled up. "You goin' past Jim Marden's?" "Yes." 
" Well, I wish you'd tell him I just run over a chicken 
of his, and I killed it, I guess. I guess it was a pretty 
big one." "Oh no," I put in, "it was only a broiler. 
What do you think it was worth?" I took out some 
money, and the farmer noted the largest coin in my 
hand; "About half a dollar, I guess." On this I put 
it all back in my pocket, and then he said, "Well, if 
a chicken don't know enough to get out of the road, 
I guess you ain't to blame." I expressed that this was 
my own view of the case, and we drove on. When we 
parted I gave the half-dollar to my driver, and begged 
him not to let the owner of the chicken come on me for 
damages ; and though he chuckled his pleasure in the 
joke, I could see that he was still unhappy, and I have 
no doubt that he has that pullet on his conscience yet, 
unless he has paid for it. He was of a race which else- 
where has so immemorially plundered hen-roosts that 
chickens are as free to it as the air it breathes, without 
any conceivable taint of private ownership. But the 
spirit of New England had so deeply entered into him 
that the imbecile broiler of another, slain by pure ac- 

229 



LITERATURE AND LIFE 

cident and by its own contributory negligence, was 
saddening him, while I was off in my train without a 
pang for the owner and with only an agreeable pathos 
for the pullet. 

II 

The instance is perhaps extreme; and, at any rate, 
it has carried me in a psychological direction away 
from the simpler differences which I meant to note in 
New England. They were evident as soon as our 
train began to run from the steamboat landing into 
the country, and they have intensified, if they have not 
multiplied, themselves as I have penetrated deeper 
and deeper into the beautiful region. The land is 
poorer than the land to the southward — one sees that 
at once ; the soil is thin, and often so thickly burdened 
with granite bowlders that it could never have borne 
any other crop since the first Puritans, or Pilgrims, 
cut away the primeval woods and betrayed its hope- 
less sterility to the light. But wherever you come to 
a farm-house, whether standing alone or in one of the 
village groups that New England farm-houses have 
always liked to gather themselves into, it is of a neat- 
ness that brings despair, and of a repair that ought to 
bring shame to the beholder from more easy-going 
conditions. Everything is kept up with a strenuous 
virtue that imparts an air of self-respect to the land- 
scape, which the bleaching and blackening stone 
walls, wandering over the hill-slopes, divide into wood 
lots of white birch and pine, stony pastures, and 
little patches of potatoes and corn. The mowing- 
lands alone are rich; and if the New England year 
is in the glory of the latest June, the breath of the 
clover blows honey -sweet into the car windows, 
and the fragrance of the new - cut hay rises hot 

230 



FROM NEW YORK INTO NEW ENGLAND 

from the heavy swaths that seem to smoke in the 
sun. 

We have struck a hot spell, one of those torrid moods 
of continental weather which we have telegraphed us 
.ahead to heighten our suffering by anticipation. But 
the farmsteads and village houses are safe in the shade 
of their sheltering trees amid the fluctuation of the 
grass that grows so tall about them that the June roses 
have to strain upward to get themselves free of it. Be- 
hind each dwelling is a billowy mass of orchard, and 
before it the Gothic archway of the elms stretches 
above the quiet street. There is no tree in the world 
so full of sentiment as the American elm, and it is no- 
where so graceful as in these New England villages, 
which are themselves, I think, the prettiest and whole- 
somest of mortal sojourns. By a happy instinct, 
their wooden houses are all painted white, to a marble 
effect that suits our meridional sky, and the contrast 
of their dark-green shutters is deliciously refreshing. 
There was an evil hour, the terrible moment of the 
aesthetic revival now happily past, when white walls 
and green blinds were thought in bad taste, and the 
village houses were often tinged a dreary ground color, 
or a doleful olive, or a gloomy red, but now they have 
returned to their earlier love. Not the first love; that 
was a pale buff with white trim ; but I doubt if it were 
good for all kinds of village houses; the eye rather 
demands the white. The pale buff does very well for 
large colonial mansions, like Lowell's or Longfellow's 
in Cambridge ; but when you come, say, to see the great 
square houses built in Portsmouth, New Hampshire, 
early in this century, and painted white, you find that 
white, after all, is the thing for our climate, even in 
the towns. 

In such a village as my colored brother drove me 
through on the way to the beach it was of an absolute 

231 



LITERATURE AND LIFE 

fitness ; and I wish I could convey a due sense of the 
exquisite keeping of the place. Each white house 
was more or less closely belted in with a white fence, 
of panels or pickets; the grassy door-yards glowed 
with flowers, and often a climbing rose embowered 
the door-way with its bloom. Away backward or 
sidewise stretched the woodshed from the dwelling 
to the barn, and shut the whole under one cover; the 
turf grew to the wheel-tracks of the road-way, over 
which the elms rose and drooped; and from one end 
of the village to the other you could not, as the saying 
is, find a stone to throw at a dog. I know Holland; 
I have seen the wives of Scheveningen scrubbing up 
for Sunday to the very middle of their brick streets, 
but I doubt if Dutch cleanliness goes so far without, 
or comes from so deep a scruple within, as the cleanli- 
ness of New England. I felt so keenly the feminine 
quality of its motive as I passed through that village, 
that I think if I had dropped so much as a piece of pa- 
per in the street I must have knocked at the first door 
and begged the lady of the house (who would have 
opened it in person after wiping her hands from her 
work, taking off her apron, and giving a glance at 
herself in the mirror and at me through the window- 
blind) to report me to the selectmen in the interest of 
good morals. 

Ill 

I did not know at once quite how to reconcile the 
present foulness of the New England capital with the 
fairness of the New England country; and I am still 
somewhat embarrassed to own that after New York 
(even under the relaxing rule of Tammany) Boston 
seemed very dirty when we arrived there. At best I 
was never more than a naturalized Bostonian; but it 

232 



FROM NEW YORK INTO NEW ENGLAND 

used to give me great pleasure — so penetratingly does 
the place qualify even the sojourning Westerner — to 
think of the defect of New York in the virtue that is 
next to godliness; and now I had to hang my head 
for shame at the mortifying contrast of the Boston 
streets to the well-swept asphalt which I had left frying 
in the New York sun the afternoon before. Later, 
however, when I began to meet the sort of Boston faces 
I remembered so well — good, just, pure, but set and 
severe, with their look of challenge, of interrogation, 
almost of reproof — they not only ignored the disgrace- 
ful untidiness of the streets, but they convinced me of 
a state of transition which would leave the place swept 
and garnished behind it; and comforted me against 
the litter of the winding thoroughfares and narrow 
lanes, where the dust had blown up against the brick 
walls, and seemed permanently to have smutched and 
discolored them. 

In New York you see the American face as Europe 
characterizes it ; in Boston you see it as it characterizes 
Europe; and it is in Boston that you can best imagine 
the strenuous grapple of the native forces which all 
alien things must yield to till they take the American 
cast. It is almost dismaying, that physiognomy, be- 
fore it familiarizes itself anew; and in the brief first 
moment while it is yet objective, you ransack your 
conscience for any sins you may have committed in 
your absence from it and make ready to do penance 
for them. I felt almost as if I had brought the dirty 
streets with me, and were guilty of having left them 
lying about, so impossible were they with reference 
to the Boston face. 

It is a face that expresses care, even to the point of 
anxiety, and it looked into the window of our carriage 
with the serious eyes of our elderly hackman to make 
perfectly sure of our destination before we drove away 

233 



LITERATURE AND LIFE 

from the station. It was a little rigorous with us, as 
requiring us to have a clear mind; but it was not un- 
friendly, not unkind, and it was patient from long 
experience. In New York there are no elderly hack- 
men ; but in Boston they abound, and I cannot believe 
they would be capable of bad faith with travellers. In 
fact, I doubt if this class is anywhere as predatory as 
it is painted ; but in Boston it appears to have the pub- 
lic honor in its keeping. I do not mean that it was 
less mature, less self -respectful in Portsmouth, where 
we were next to arrive; more so it could not be; an 
equal sense of safety, of ease, began with it in both 
places, and all through New England it is of native 
birth, while in New York it is composed of men of many 
nations, with a weight in numbers towards the Celtic 
strain. The prevalence of the native in New Eng- 
land helps you sensibly to realize from the first mo- 
ment that here you are in America as the first Amer- 
icans imagined and meant it; and nowhere in New 
England is the original tradition more purely kept 
than in the beautiful old seaport of New Hampshire. 
In fact, without being quite prepared to defend a thesis 
to this effect, I believe that Portsmouth is pre-emi- 
nently American, and in this it differs from Newbury- 
port and from Salem, which have suffered from differ- 
ent causes an equal commercial decline, and, though 
among the earliest of the great Puritan towns after 
Boston, are now largely made up of aliens in race and 
religion; these are actually the majority, I believe, in 
Newburyport. 

IV 

The adversity of Portsmouth began early in the 
century, but before that time she had prospered so 
greatly that her merchant princes were able to build 

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FROM NEW YORK INTO NEW ENGLAND 

themselves wooden palaces with white walls and green 
shutters, of a grandeur and beauty unmatched else- 
where in the country. I do not know what architect 
had his way with them, though his name is richly 
worth remembrance, but they let him make them hab- 
itations of such graceful proportion and of such deli- 
cate ornament that they have become shrines of pious 
pilgrimage with the young architects of our day who 
hope to house our well-to-do people fitly in country 
or suburbs. The decoration is oftenest spent on a 
porch or portal, or a frieze of peculiar refinement; or 
perhaps it feels its way to the carven casements or 
to the delicate iron- work of the transoms; the rest is 
a simplicity and a faultless propriety of form in the 
stately mansions which stand under the arching elms, 
with their gardens sloping, or dropping by easy ter- 
races behind them to the river, or to the borders of 
other pleasances. They are all of wood, except for 
the granite foundations and doorsteps, but the stout 
edifices rarely sway out of the true line given them, 
and they look as if they might keep it yet another 
century. 

Between them, in the sun-shotten shade, lie the 
quiet streets, whose gravelled stretch is probably never 
cleaned because it never needs cleaning. Even the 
business streets, and the quaint square which gives 
the most American of towns an air so foreign and 
Old Worldly, look as if the wind and rain alone cared 
for them ; but they are not foul, and the narrower ave- 
nues, where the smaller houses of gray, unpainted 
wood crowd each other, flush upon the pavements, 
towards the water -side, are doubtless unvisited by 
the hoe or broom, and must be kept clean by a New 
England conscience against getting them untidy. 

When you get to the river-side there is one stretch 
of narrow, high-shouldered warehouses which recall 

235 



LITERATURE AND LIFE 

Holland, especially in a few with their gables broken 
in steps, after the Dutch fashion. These, with their 
mouldering piers and grass-grown wharves, have their 
pathos, and the whole place embodies in its architecture 
an interesting record of the past, from the time when 
the homesick exiles huddled close to the water's edge 
till the period of post-colonial prosperity, when proud 
merchants and opulent captains set their vast square 
houses each in its handsome space of gardened ground. 
My adjectives might mislead as to size, but they 
could not as to beauty, and I seek in vain for those 
that can duly impart the peculiar charm of the town. 
Portsmouth still awaits her novelist; he will find a 
rich field when he comes; and I hope he will come of 
the right sex, for it needs some minute and subtle 
feminine skill, like that of Jane Austen, to express a 
fit sense of its life in the past. Of its life in the pres- 
ent I know nothing. I could only go by those de- 
lightful, silent houses, and sigh my longing soul into 
their dim interiors. When now and then a young 
shape in summer silk, or a group of young shapes 
in diaphanous muslin, fluttered out of them, I was 
no wiser; and doubtless my elderly fancy would have 
been unable to deal with what went on in them. Some 
girl of those flitting through the warm, odorous twi- 
light must become the creative historian of the place; 
I can at least imagine a Jane Austen now growing up 
in Portsmouth. 



If Miss Jewett were of a little longer breath than 
she has yet shown herself in fiction, I might say the 
Jane Austen of Portsmouth was already with us, and 
had merely not yet begun to deal with its precious ma- 
terial. One day when we crossed the Piscataqua from 

236 



FROM NEW YORK INTO NEW ENGLAND 

New Hampshire into Maine, and took the trolley-line 
for a run along through the lovely coast country, we 
suddenly found ourselves in the midst of her own 
people, who are a little different sort of New-England- 
ers from those of Miss Wilkins. They began to flock 
into the car, young maidens and old, mothers and 
grandmothers, and nice boys and girls, with a very, 
very few farmer youth of marriageable age, and more 
rustic and seafaring elders long past it, all in the Sun- 
day best which they had worn to the graduation exer- 
cises at the High School, where we took them mostly 
up. The womenkind were in a nervous twitter of talk 
and laughter, and the men tolerantly gay beyond their 
wont, " passing the time of day " with one another, and 
helping the more tumultuous sex to get settled in the 
overcrowded open car. They courteously made room 
for one another, and let the children stand between 
their knees, or took them in their laps, with that un- 
failing American kindness which I am prouder of than 
the American valor in battle, observing in all that 
American decorum which is no bad thing either. We 
had chanced upon the high and mighty occasion of 
the neighborhood year, when people might well have 
been a little off their balance, but there was not a bois- 
terous note in the subdued affair. As we passed the 
school-house door, three dear, pretty maids in white 
gowns and white slippers stood on the steps and gently 
smiled upon our company. One could see that they 
were inwardly glowing and thrilling with the excite- 
ment of their graduation, but were controlling their 
emotions to a calm worthy of the august event, so that 
no one might ever have it to say that they had ap- 
peared silly. 

The car swept on, and stopped to set down passengers 
at their doors or gates, where they severally left it, with 
an easy air as of private ownership, into some sense 

237 



LITERATURE AND LIFE 

of which the trolley promptly flatters people along its 
obliging lines. One comfortable matron, in a cinna- 
mon silk, was just such a figure as that in the Miss 
Wilkins's story where the bridegroom fails to come on 
the wedding-day; but, as I say, they made me think 
more of Miss Jewett's people. The shore folk and the 
Down-Easters are specifically hers ; and these were just 
such as might have belonged in The Country of the 
Pointed Firs, or Sister Wisby's Courtship, or Dulham 
Ladies, or An Autumn Ramble, or twenty other en- 
trancing tales. Sometimes one of them would try 
her front door, and then, with a bridling toss of the 
head, express that she had forgotten locking it, and 
slip round to the kitchen; but most of the ladies made 
their way back at once between the roses and syringas 
of their grassy door-yards, which were as neat and prim 
as their own persons, or the best chamber in their 
white-walled, green-shuttered, story-and-a-half house, 
and as perfectly kept as the very kitchen itself. 



VI 

The trolley- line had been opened only since the last 
September, but in an effect of familiar use it was as 
if it had always been there, and it climbed and crooked 
and clambered about with the easy freedom of the 
country road which it followed. It is a land of low 
hills, broken by frequent reaches of the sea, and it 
is most amusing, most amazing, to see how frankly 
the trolley-car takes and overcomes its difficulties. It 
scrambles up and down the little steeps like a cat, and 
whisks round a sharp and sudden curve with a feline 
screech, broadening into a loud caterwaul as it darts 
over the estuaries on its trestles. Its course does not 
lack excitement, and I suppose it does not lack danger ; 

233 



FROM NEW YORK INTO NEW ENGLAND 

but as yet there have been no accidents, and it is not 
so disfiguring as one would think. The landscape 
has already accepted it, and is making the best of it; 
and to the country people it is an inestimable conven- 
ience. It passes everybody's front door or back door, 
and the farmers can get themselves or their produce 
(for it runs an express car) into Portsmouth in an hour, 
twice an hour, all day long. In summer the cars are 
open, with transverse seats, and stout curtains that 
quite shut out a squall of wind or rain. In winter the 
cars are closed, and heated by electricity. The young 
motorman whom I spoke with, while we waited on a 
siding to let a car from the opposite direction get by, 
told me that he was caught out in a blizzard last win- 
ter, and passed the night in a snow-drift. "But the 
cah was so wa'm, I neva suff'ed a mite. " 

"Well/' I summarized, "it must be a great advan- 
tage to all the people along the line." 

"Well, you wouldn't 'a' thought so, from the kick 
they made/' 

"I suppose the cottagers" — the summer colony — 
"didn't like the noise." 

" Oh yes ; that's what I mean. The's whe' the kick 
was. The natives like it. I guess the summa folks 
'11 like it, too." 

He looked round at me with enjoyment of his joke 
in his eye, for we both understood that the summer 
folks could not help themselves, and must bow to the 
will of the majority. 



THE STANDARD HOUSEHOLD-EFFECT 
COMPANY 



MY friend came in the other day, before we had 
left town, and looked round at the appointments 
of the room in their summer shrouds, and said, with a 
faint sigh, "I see you have had the eternal-womanly 
with you, too/' 



"Isn't the eternal- womanly everywhere? What has 
happened to you?" I asked. 

" I wish you would come to my house and see. Every 
rug has been up for a month, and we have been living 
on bare floors. Everything that could be tied up has 
been tied up, everything that could be sewed up has 
been sewed up. Everything that could be moth-balled 
and put away in chests has been moth-balled and put 
away. Everything that could be taken down has been 
taken down. Bags with draw-strings at their necks 
have been pulled over the chandeliers and tied. The 
pictures have been hidden in cheese-cloth, and the mir- 
rors veiled in gauze so that I cannot see my own mis- 
erable face anywhere." 

"Come! That's something." 

"Yes, it's something. But I have been thinking 
this matter over very seriously, and I believe it is go- 
ing from bad to worse. I have heard praises of the 
thorough housekeeping of our grandmothers, but the 

240 



THE STANDARD HOUSEHOLD-EFFECT COMPANY 

housekeeping of their granddaughters is a thousand 
times more intense/' 

"Do you really believe that?" I asked. "And if 
you do, what of it?" 

" Simply this, that if we don't put a stop to it, at the 
gait it's going, it will put a stop to the eternal- womanly. " 

"I suppose we should hate that." 

" Yes, it would be bad. It would be very bad ; and I 
have been turning the matter over in my mind, and 
studying out a remedy." 

" The highest type of philosopher turns a thing over 
in his mind and lets some one else study out a remedy." 

"Yes, I know. I feel that I may be wrong in my 
processes, but I am sure that I am right in my results. 
The reason why our grandmothers could be such good 
housekeepers without danger of putting a stop to the 
eternal- womanly was that they had so few things to 
look after in their houses. Life was indefinitely sim- 
pler with them. But the modern improvements, as 
we call them, have multiplied the cares of housekeep- 
ing without subtracting its burdens, as they were ex- 
pected to do. Every novel convenience and comfort, 
every article of beauty and luxury, every means of re- 
finement and enjoyment in our houses, has been so 
much added to the burdens of housekeeping, and the 
granddaughters have inherited from the grandmothers 
an undiminished conscience against rust and the moth, 
which will not suffer them to forget the least duty they 
owe to the naughtiest of their superfluities." 

"Yes, I see what you mean," I said. This is what 
one usually says when one does not quite know what 
another is driving at ; but in this case I really did know, 
or thought I did. "That survival of the conscience 
is a very curious thing, especially in our eternal-wom- 
anly. I suppose that the North American conscience 
was evolved from the rudimental European conscience 
** 241 



LITERATURE AND LIFE 

during the first centuries of struggle here, and was 
more or less religious and economical in its origin. 
But with the advance of wealth and the decay of faith 
among us, the conscience seems to be simply con- 
scientious, or, if it is otherwise, it is social. The eter- 
nal-womanly continues along the old lines of house- 
keeping from an atavistic impulse, and no one woman 
can stop because all the other women are going on. 
It is something in the air, or something in the blood. 
Perhaps it is something in both." 

"Yes/' said my friend, quite as I had said already, 
" I see what you mean. But I think it is in the air more 
than in the blood. I was in Paris, about this time last 
year, perhaps because I was the only thing in my 
house that had not been swathed in cheese-cloth, or 
tied up in a bag with draw-strings, or rolled up with 
moth-balls and put away in chests. At any rate, I 
was there. One day I left my wife in New York care- 
fully tagging three worn-out feather dusters, and put- 
ting them into a pillow-case, and tagging it, and put- 
ting the pillow-case into a camphorated self-sealing 
paper sack, and tagging it; and another day I was in 
Paris, dining at the house of a lady whom I asked how 
she managed with the things in her house when she 
went into the country for the summer. 'Leave them 
just as they are/ she said. 'But what about the dust 
and the moths, and the rust and the tarnish?' She 
said, ' Why, the things would have to be all gone over 
when I came back in the autumn, anyway, and why 
should I give myself double trouble?' I asked her if 
she didn't even roll anything up and put it away in 
closets, and she said: 'Oh, you mean that old Amer- 
ican horror of getting ready to go away. I used to go 
through all that at home, too, but I shouldn't dream 
of it here. In the first place, there are no closets in the 
house, and I couldn't put anything away if I wanted 

242 



THE STANDARD HOUSEHOLD-EFFECT COMPANY 

to. And really nothing happens. I scatter some 
Persian powder along the edges of things, and under 
the lower shelves, and in the dim corners, and I pull 
down the shades. When I come back in the fall I 
have the powder swept out, and the shades pulled up, 
and begin living again. Suppose a little dust has 
got in, and the moths have nibbled a little here and 
there? The whole damage would not amount to half 
the cost of putting everything away and taking every- 
thing out, not to speak of the weeks of discomfort, and 
the wear and tear of spirit. No, thank goodness! I 
left American housekeeping in America. ' I asked her : 
' But if you went back?' and she gave a sigh, and said : 
' I suppose I should go back to that, along with all the 
rest. Everybody does it there. ' So you see/' my friend 
concluded, "it's in the air, rather than the blood." 

"Then your famous specific is that our eternal- 
womanly should go and live in Paris?" 

" Oh, dear, nol" said my friend. " Nothing so drastic 
as all that. Merely the extinction of household property. ' ' 

"I see what you mean," I said. "But — what do 
you mean?" 

" Simply that hired houses, such as most of us live 
in, shall all be furnished houses, and that the landlord 
shall own every stick in them, and every appliance 
down to the last spoon and ultimate towel. There 
must be no compromise, by which the tenant agrees 
to provide his own linen and silver; that would neu- 
tralize the effect I intend by the expropriation of the 
personal proprietor, if that says what I mean. It must 
be in the lease, with severe penalties against the ten- 
ant in case of violation, that the landlord is to furnish 
everything in perfect order when the tenant comes 
in, and is to put everything in perfect order when the 
tenant goes out, and the tenant is not to touch any- 
thing, to clean it, or dust it, or roll it up in moth-balls 

243 



LITERATURE AND LIFE 

and put it away in chests. All is to be so sacredly 
and inalienably the property of the landlord that it 
shall constitute a kind of trespass if the tenant at- 
tempts to close the house for the summer or to open 
it for the winter in the usual way that houses are now 
closed and opened. Otherwise my scheme would be 
measurably vitiated." 

"I see what you mean/' I murmured. "Well?" 

"Some years ago/' my friend went on, "when we 
came home from Europe, we left our furniture in stor- 
age for a time, while we rather drifted about, and did 
not settle anywhere in particular. During that in- 
terval my wife opened and closed five furnished houses 
in two years." 

"And she has lived to tell the tale?" 

" She has lived to tell it a great many times. She 
can hardly be kept from telling it yet. But it is my 
belief that, although she brought to the work all the 
anguish of a quickened conscience, under the influ- 
ence of the American conditions she had returned to, 
she suffered far less in her encounters with either of 
those furnished houses than she now does with our 
own furniture when she shuts up our house in the 
summer, and opens it for the winter. But if there 
had been a clause in the lease, as there should have 
been, forbidding her to put those houses in order when 
she left them, life would have been simply a rapture. 
Why, in Europe custom almost supplies the place of 
statute in such cases, and you come and go so lightly 
in and out of furnished houses that you do not mind 
taking them for a month, or a few weeks. We are 
very far behind in this matter> but I have no doubt 
that if we once came to do it on any extended scale 
we should do it, as we do everything else we attempt, 
more perfectly than any other people in the world. 
You see what I mean?" 

244 



THE STANDARD HOUSEHOLD-EFFECT COMPANY 

"I am not sure that I do. But go on/' 

"I would invert the whole Henry George principle, 
and I would tax personal property of the household 
kind so heavily that it would necessarily pass out of 
private hands ; I would make its tenure so costly that 
it would be impossible to any but the very rich, who 
are also the very wicked, and ought to suffer." 

"Oh, come, now!" 

"I refer you to your Testament. In the end, all 
household property would pass into the hands of the 
state." 

"Aren't you getting worse and worse?" 

"Oh, I'm not supposing there won't be a long inter- 
val when household property will be in the hands of 
powerful monopolies, and many millionaires will be 
made by letting it out to middle-class tenants like you 
and me, along with the houses we hire of them. I 
have no doubt that there will be a Standard House- 
hold-Effect Company, which will extend its relations 
to Europe, and get the household effects of the whole 
world into its grasp. It will be a fearful oppression, 
and we shall probably groan under it for generations, 
but it will liberate us from our personal ownership of 
them, and from the far more crushing weight of the 
moth-ball. We shall suffer, but—" 

"I see what you mean," I hastened to interrupt at 
this point, "but these suggestive remarks of yours 
are getting beyond — Do you think you could defer 
the rest of your incompleted sentence for a week?" 

"Well, for not more than a week," said my friend, 
with an air of discomfort in his arrest. 



n 

— " We shall not suffer so much as we do under our 
present system," said my friend, completing his sen- 

245 



LITERATURE AND LIFE 

tence after the interruption of a week. By this time 
we had both left town, and were taking up the talk 
again on the veranda of a sea-side hotel. "As for 
the eternal-womanly, it will be her salvation from her- 
self. When once she is expropriated from her house- 
hold effects, and forbidden under severe penalties from 
meddling with those of the Standard Household-Effect 
Company, she will begin to get back her peace of mind, 
and be the same blessing she was before she began 
housekeeping." 

"That may all very well be," I assented, though I 
did not believe it, and I found something almost too 
fantastical in my friend's scheme. "But when we 
are expropriated from all our dearest belongings, what 
is to become of our tender and sacred associations with 
them?" 

" What has become of devotion to the family gods, 
and the worship of ancestors? Once the graves of 
the dead were at the door of the living, so that liba- 
tions might be conveniently poured out on them, and 
the ground where they lay was inalienable because it 
was supposed to be used by their spirits as well as 
their bodies. A man could not sell the bones, because 
he could not sell the ghosts, of his kindred. By-and- 
by, when religion ceased to be domestic and became 
social, and the service of the gods was carried on in 
temples common to all, it was found that the tombs 
of one's forefathers could be sold without violence to 
their spectres. I dare say it wouldn't be different in 
the case of our tender and sacred associations with 
tables and chairs, pots and pans, beds and bedding, 
pictures and bric-a-brac. We have only to evolve a 
little further. In fact we have already evolved far 
beyond the point that troubles you. Most people in 
modern towns and cities have changed their domiciles 
from ten to twenty times during their lives, and have 

246 



THE STANDARD HOUSEHOLD-EFFECT COMPANY 

not paid the slightest attention to the tender and sacred 
associations connected with them. I don't suppose you 
would say that a man has no such associations with 
the house that has sheltered him, while he has them 
with the stuff that has furnished it?" 

"No, I shouldn't say that." 

"If anything, the house should be dearer than the 
household gear. Yet at each remove we drag a length- 
ening chain of tables, chairs, side -boards, portraits, 
landscapes, bedsteads, washstands, stoves, kitchen 
utensils, and bric-a-brac after us, because, as my wife 
says, we cannot bear to part with them. At several 
times in our own lives we have accumulated stuff 
enough to furnish two or three houses and have paid 
a pretty stiff house -rent in the form of storage for 
the overflow. Why, I am doing that very thing now I 
Aren't you?" 

"I am — in a certain degree," I assented. 

" We all are, we well-to-do people, as we think our- 
selves. Once my wife and I revolted by a common 
impulse against the ridiculous waste and slavery of 
the thing. We went to the storage warehouse and 
sent three or four van-loads of the rubbish to the auc- 
tioneer. Some of the pieces we had not seen for years, 
and as each was hauled out for us to inspect and de- 
cide upon, we condemned it to the auction-block with 
shouts of rejoicing. Tender and sacred associations! 
We hadn't had such light hearts since we had put 
everything in storage and gone to Europe indefinite- 
ly as we had when we left those things to be carted 
out of our lives forever. Not one had been a pleas- 
ure to us ; the sight of every one had been a pang. 
All we wanted was never to set eyes on them 
again." 

"I must say you have disposed of the tender and 
sacred associations pretty effectually, so far as they 

247 



LITERATURE AND LIFE 

relate to things in storage. But the things that we 
have in daily use?" 

"It is exactly the same with them. Why should 
they be more to us than the floors and walls of the 
houses we move in and move out of with no particu- 
lar pathos? And I think we ought not to care for them, 
certainly not to the point of letting them destroy our 
eternal-womanly with the anxiety she feels for them. 
She is really much more precious, if she could but 
realize it, than anything she swathes in cheese-cloth 
or wraps up with moth-balls. The proof of the fact 
that the whole thing is a piece of mere sentimentality 
is that we may live in a furnished house for years, 
amid all the accidents of birth and death, joy and sor- 
row, and yet not form the slightest attachment to the 
furniture. Why should we have tender and sacred 
associations with a thing we have bought, and not 
with a thing we have hired?" 

" I confess, I don't know. And do you really think 
we could liberate ourselves from our belongings if they 
didn't belong to us? Wouldn't the eternal - womanly 
still keep putting them away for summer and taking 
them out for winter?" 

" At first, yes, there might be some such mechanical 
action in her ; but it would be purely mechanical, and it 
would soon cease. When the Standard Household- 
Effect Company came down on the temporal-manly 
with a penalty for violation of the lease, the eternal- 
womanly would see the folly of her ways and stop; 
for the eternal - womanly is essentially economical, 
whatever we say about the dressmaker's bills; and 
the very futilities of putting away and taking out, 
that she now wears herself to a thread with, are found- 
ed in the instinct of saving." 

"But," I asked, "wouldn't our household belong- 
ings lose a good deal of character if they didn't belong 

248 



THE STANDARD HOUSEHOLD-EFFECT COMPANY 

to us? Wouldn't our domestic interiors become dread- 
fully impersonal?" 

"How many houses now have character — person- 
ality? Most people let the different dealers choose 
for them, as it is. Why not let the Standard House- 
hold-Effect Company, and finally the state? I am 
sure that either would choose much more wisely than 
people choose for themselves, in the few cases where 
they even seem to choose for themselves. In most 
interiors the appointments are without fitness, taste, 
or sense ; they are the mere accretions of accident in 
the greater number of cases; where they are the re- 
sult of design, they are worse. I see what you mean 
by character and personality in them. You mean 
the sort of madness that let itself loose a few years 
ago in what was called household art, and has since 
gone to make the junk-shops hideous. Each of the 
eternal-womanly was supposed suddenly to have ac- 
quired a talent for decoration and a gift for the selec- 
tion and arrangement of furniture, and each began 
to stamp herself upon our interiors. One painted a 
high - shouldered stone bottle with a stork and stood 
it at the right corner of the mantel on a scarf ; another 
gilded the bottle and stood it at the left corner, and 
tied the scarf through its handle. One knotted a ribbon 
around the arm of a chair ; another knotted it around 
the leg. In a day, an hour, a moment, the chairs sud- 
denly became angular, cushionless, springless; and 
the sofas were stood across corners, or parallel with 
the fireplace, in slants expressive of the personality 
of the presiding genius. The walls became all frieze 
and dado; and instead of the simple and dignified 
ugliness of the impersonal period our interiors aban- 
doned themselves to a hysterical chaos, full of character. 
Some people had their doors painted black, and the 
daughter or mother of the house then decorated them 

249 



LITERATURE AND LIFE 

with morning-glories. I saw such a door in a house 
I looked at the other day, thinking I might hire it. 
The sight of that black door and its morning-glories 
made me wish to turn aside and live with the cattle, 
as Walt Whitman says. No, the less we try to get 
personality and character into our household effects 
the more beautiful and interesting they will be. As 
soon as we put the Standard Household-Effect Com- 
pany in possession and render it a relentless monop- 
oly, it will corrupt a competent architect and decorator 
in each of our large towns and cities, and when you 
hire a new house these will be sent to advise with the 
eternal - womanly concerning its appointments, and 
tell her what she wants, and what she will like; for 
at present the eternal womanly, as soon as she has 
got a thing she wants, begins to hate it. The com- 
pany's agents will begin by convincing her that she 
does not need half the things she has lumbered up her 
house with, and that every useless thing is an ugly 
thing, even in the region of pure aesthetics. I once 
asked an Italian painter if he did not think a certain 
nobly imagined drawing-room was fine, and he said: 
'Si. Ma troppa roba.' There were too many rugs, 
tables, chairs, sofas, pictures, vases, statues, chan- 
deliers. Troppa roba is the vice of all our household 
furnishing, and it will be the death of the eternal- 
womanly if it is not stopped. But the corrupt agents 
of a giant monopoly will teach the eternal-womanly 
something of the wise simplicity of the South, and 
she will end by returning to the ideal of housekeep- 
ing as it prevails among the Latin races, whom it be- 
gan with, whom civilization began with. What of a 
harmless, necessary moth or two, or even a few 
fleas ?" 

"That might be all very well as far as furniture 
and carpets and curtains are concerned/' I said, "but 

250 



THE STANDARD HOUSEHOLD-EFFECT COMPANY 

surely you wouldn't apply it to pictures and objects of 
art?" 

" I would apply it to them first of all and above all/' 
rejoined my friend, hardily. "Among all the people 
who buy and own such things there is not one in a 
thousand who has any real taste or feeling for them, 
and the objects they choose are generally such as can 
only deprave and degrade them further. The pict- 
ures, statues, and vases supplied by the Standard 
Household-Effect Company would be selected by agents 
with a real sense of art, and a knowledge of it. When 
the house-letting and house-furnishing finally passed 
into the hands of the state, these things would be lent 
from the public galleries, or from immense municipal 
stores for the purpose." 

"And I suppose you would have ancestral portraits 
supplied along with the other pictures?" I sneered. 

"Ancestral portraits, of course," said my friend, 
with unruffled temper. "So few people have ances- 
tors of their own that they will be very glad to have 
ancestral portraits chosen for them out of the collec- 
tions of the company or the state. The agents of the 
one, or the officers of the other, will study the existing 
type of family face, and will select ancestors and an- 
cestresses whose modelling, coloring, and expression 
agree with it, and will keep in view the race and na- 
tionality of the family whose ancestral portraits are 
to be supplied, so that there shall be no chance of the 
grossly improbable effect which ancestral portraits 
now have in many cases. Yes, I see no flaw in the 
scheme," my friend concluded, "and no difficulty 
that can't be easily overcome. We must alienate our 
household furniture, and make it so sensitively and 
exclusively the property of some impersonal agency 
— company or community, I don't care which — that 
any care of it shall be a sort of crime; any sense of 

251 



LITERATURE AND LIFE 

responsibility for its preservation a species of incivism 
punishable by fine or imprisonment. This, and noth- 
ing short of it, will be the salvation of the eternal- 
womanly/' 

" And the perdition of something even more precious 
than that!" 

" What can be more precious?" 

"Individuality." 

"My dear friend," demanded my visitor, who had 
risen, and whom I was gradually edging to the door, 
"do you mean to say there is any individuality in 
such things now? What have we been saying about 
character?" 

" Ah, I see what you mean," I said. 



STACCATO NOTES OF A VANISHED SUMMER 

MONDAY afternoon the storm which had been 
beating up against the southeasterly wind 
nearly all day thickened, fold upon fold, in the north- 
west. The gale increased, and blackened the harbor 
and whitened the open sea beyond, where sail after 
sail appeared round the reef of Whaleback Light, and 
ran in a wild scamper for the safe anchorages within. 
Since noon cautious coasters of all sorts had been 
dropping in with a casual air; the coal schooners and 
barges had rocked and nodded knowingly to one an- 
other, with their taper and truncated masts, on the 
breast of the invisible swell; and the flock of little 
yachts and pleasure-boats which always fleck the 
bay huddled together in the safe waters. The craft 
that came scurrying in just before nightfall were mack- 
erel seiners from Gloucester. They were all of one 
graceful shape and one size; they came with all sail 
set, taking the waning light like sunshine on their fly- 
ing-jibs, and trailing each two dories behind them, with 
their seines piled in black heaps between the thwarts. 
As soon as they came inside their jibs weakened and 
fell, and the anchor-chains rattled from their bows. 
Before the dark hid them we could have counted sixty 
or seventy ships in the harbor, and as the night fell 
they improvised a little Venice under the hill with 
their lights, which twinkled rhythmically, like the 
lamps in the basin of St. Mark, between the Maine 
and New Hampshire coasts. 

253 



LITERATURE AND LIFE 

There was a dash of rain, and we thought the storm 
had begun; but that ended it, as so many times this 
summer a dash of rain has ended a storm. The morn- 
ing came veiled in a fog that kept the shipping at an- 
chor through the day; but the next night the weather 
cleared. We woke to the clucking of tackle, and saw 
the whole fleet standing dreamily out to sea. When 
they were fairly gone, the summer, which had held 
aloof in dismay of the sudden cold, seemed to return 
and possess the land again; and the succession of sil- 
ver days and crystal nights resumed the tranquil round 
which we thought had ceased. 



One says of every summer, when it is drawing near 
its end, " There never was such a summer"; but if the 
summer is one of those which slip from the feeble hold 
of elderly hands, when the days of the years may be 
reckoned with the scientific logic of the insurance 
tables and the sad conviction of the psalmist, one sees 
it go with a passionate prescience of never seeing its 
like again such as the younger witness cannot know. 
Each new summer of the few left must be shorter and 
swifter than the last: its Junes will be thirty days 
long, and its Julys and Augusts thirty-one, in com- 
pliance with the almanac; but the days will be of so 
small a compass that fourteen of them will rattle round 
in a week of the old size like shrivelled peas in a pod. 

To be sure they swell somewhat in the retrospect, 
like the same peas put to soak; and I am aware now 
of some June days of those which we first spent at 
Kittery Point this year, which were nearly twenty- 
four hours long. Even the days of declining years 
linger a little here, where there is nothing to hurry 

254 



STACCATO NOTES OF A VANISHED SUMMER 

them, and where it is pleasant to loiter, and muse be- 
side the sea and shore, which are so netted together 
at Kittery Point that they hardly know themselves 
apart. The days, whatever their length, are divided, 
not into hours, but into mails. They begin, without 
regard to the sun, at eight o'clock, when the first mail 
comes with a few letters and papers which had forgot- 
ten themselves the night before. At half-past eleven 
the great mid-day mail arrives; at four o'clock there 
is another indifferent and scattering post, much like 
that at eight in the morning; and at seven the last 
mail arrives with the Boston evening papers and the 
New York morning papers, to make you forget any 
letters you were looking for. The opening of the 
mid-day mail is that which most throngs with sum- 
mer folks the little post-office under the elms, oppo- 
site the weather-beaten mansion of Sir William Pep- 
perrell ; but the evening mail attracts a large and main- 
ly disinterested circle of natives. The day's work on 
land and sea is then over, and the village leisure, 
perched upon fences and stayed against house walls, 
is of a picturesqueness which we should prize if we saw 
it abroad, and which I am not willing to slight on our 
own ground. 

II 

The type is mostly of a seafaring brown, a com- 
plexion which seems to be inherited rather than per- 
sonally acquired; for the commerce of Kittery Point 
perished long ago, and the fishing fleets that used to 
fit out from her wharves have almost as long ago passed 
to Gloucester. All that is left of the fishing interest 
is the weir outside which supplies, fitfully and uncer- 
tainly, the fish shipped fresh to the nearest markets. 
But in spite of this the tint taken from the suns and 

255 



LITERATURE AND LIFE 

winds of the sea lingers on the local complexion; and 
the local manner is that freer and easier manner of 
people who have known other coasts, and are in some 
sort citizens of the world. It is very different from the 
inland New England manner; as different as the gen- 
tle, slow speech of the shore from the clipped nasals 
of the hill-country. The lounging native walk is not 
the heavy plod taught by the furrow, but has the lurch 
and the sway of the deck in it. 

Nothing could be better suited to progress through 
the long village, which rises and sinks beside the shore 
like a landscape with its sea-legs on ; and nothing could 
be more charming and friendly than this village. It 
is quite untainted as yet by the summer cottages which 
have covered so much of the coast, and made it look as 
if the aesthetic suburbs of New York and Boston had 
gone ashore upon it. There are two or three old-fash- 
ioned summer hotels ; but the summer life distinctly 
fails to characterize the place. The people live where 
their forefathers have lived for two hundred and fifty 
years; and for the century since the baronial domain 
of Sir William was broken up and his possessions con- 
fiscated by the young Republic, they have dwelt in 
small red or white houses on their small holdings along 
the slopes and levels of the low hills beside the water, 
where a man may pass with the least inconvenience 
and delay from his threshold to his gunwale. Not all 
the houses are small; some are spacious and ambi- 
tious to be of ugly modern patterns; but most are 
simple and homelike. Their gardens, following the 
example of Sir William's vanished pleasaunce, drop 
southward to the shore, where the lobster-traps and 
the hen-coops meet in unembarrassed promiscuity. 
But the fish-flakes which once gave these inclines the 
effect of terraced vineyards have passed as utterly as 
the proud parterres of the old baronet ; and Kittery Point 

256 



STACCATO NOTES OF A VANISHED SUMMER 

no longer " makes" a cod or a haddock for the mar- 
ket. 

Three groceries, a butcher shop, and a small variety 
store study the few native wants; and with a little 
money one may live in as great real comfort here as 
for much in a larger place. The street takes care of 
itself ; the seafaring housekeeping of New England is 
not of the insatiable Dutch type which will not spare 
the stones of the highway; but within the houses are 
of almost terrifying cleanliness. The other day I 
found myself in a kitchen where the stove shone like 
oxidized silver; the pump and sink were clad in oil- 
cloth as with blue tiles; the walls were papered; the 
stainless floor was strewn with home-made hooked and 
braided rugs ; and I felt the place so altogether too good 
for me that I pleaded to stay there for the transaction 
of my business, lest a sharper sense of my unfitness 
should await me in the parlor. 

The village, with scarcely an interval of farm-lands, 
stretches four miles along the water-side to Portsmouth ; 
but it seems to me that just at the point where our lines 
have fallen there is the greatest concentration of its 
character. This has apparently not been weakened, 
it has been accented, by the trolley-line which passes 
through its whole length, with gayly freighted cars 
coming and going every half-hour. I suppose they are 
not longer than other trolley-cars, but they each affect 
me like a procession. They are cheerful presences 
by day, and by night they light up the dim, winding 
street with the flare of their electric bulbs, and bring to 
the country a vision of city splendor upon terms that 
do not humiliate or disquiet. During July and Au- 
gust they are mostly filled with summer folks from a 
great summer resort beyond us, and their lights reveal 
the pretty fashions of hats and gowns in all the charm 
of the latest lines and tints. But there is an increasing 
17 257 



LITERATURE AND LIFE 

democracy in these splendors, and one might easily 
mistake a passing excursionist from some neighbor- 
ing inland town, or even a local native with the instinct 
of clothes, for a social leader from York Harbor. 

With the falling leaf, the bargelike open cars close 
up into well-warmed saloons, and falter to hourly in- 
tervals in their course. But we are still far from the 
falling leaf; we are hardly come to the blushing or 
fading leaf. Here and there an impassioned maple 
confesses the autumn; the ancient Pepperrell elms 
fling down showers of the baronet's fairy gold in the 
September gusts ; the sumacs and the blackberry vines 
are ablaze along the tumbling black stone walls; but 
it is still summer, it is still summer: I cannot allow 
otherwise! 



Ill 

The other day I visited for the first time (in the opu- 
lent indifference of one who could see it any time) the 
stately tomb of the first Pepperrell, who came from 
Cornwall to these coasts, and settled finally at Kittery 
Point. He laid there the foundations of the greatest 
fortune in colonial New England, which revolutionary 
New England seized and dispersed, as I cannot but 
feel, a little ruthlessly. In my personal quality I am 
of course averse to all great fortunes ; and in my civic 
capacity I am a patriot. But still I feel a sort of grace 
in wealth a century old, and if I could now have my 
way, I would not have had their possessions reft from 
those kindly Pepperrells, who could hardly help being 
loyal to the fountain of their baronial honors. Sir Will- 
iam, indeed, had helped, more than any other man, to 
bring the people who despoiled him to a national con- 
sciousness. If he did not imagine, he mainly managed 
the plucky New England expedition against Louis- 

258 



STACCATO NOTES OF A VANISHED SUMMER 

bourg at Cape Breton a half century before the War 
of Independence; and his splendid success in rending 
that stronghold from the French taught the colonists 
that they were Americans, and need be Englishmen 
no longer than they liked. His soldiers were of the 
stamp of all succeeding American armies, and his 
leadership was of the neighborly and fatherly sort 
natural to an amiable man who knew most of them 
personally. He was already the richest man in Amer- 
ica, and his grateful king made him a baronet; but 
he came contentedly back to Kittery, and took up his 
old life in a region where he had the comfortable con- 
sideration of an unrivalled magnate. He built him- 
self the dignified mansion which still stands across 
the way from the post-office on Kittery Point, within 
an easy stone's cast of the far older house, where his 
father wedded Margery Bray, when he came, a thrifty 
young Welsh fisherman, from the Isles of Shoals, and 
established his family on Kittery. The Bray house 
had been the finest in the region a hundred years be- 
fore the Pepperrell mansion was built; it still remem- 
bers its consequence in the panelling and wainscoting 
of the large, square parlor where the young people 
were married and in the elaborate staircase cramped 
into the little, square hall ; and the Bray fortune helped 
materially to swell the wealth of the Pepperrells. 

I do not know that I should care now to have a man 
able to ride thirty miles on his own land ; but I do not 
mind Sir William's having done it here a hundred 
and fifty years ago; and I wish the confiscations had 
left his family, say, about a mile of it. They could 
now, indeed, enjoy it only in the collateral branches, 
for all Sir William's line is extinct. The splendid 
mansion which he built his daughter is in alien hands, 
and the fine old house which Lady Pepperrell built 
herself after his death belongs to the remotest of kins- 

259 



LITERATURE AND LIFE 

men. A group of these, the descendants of a prolific 
sister of the baronet, meets every year at Kittery Point 
as the Pepperrell Association, and, in a tent hard 
by the little grove of drooping spruces which shade 
the admirable renaissance cenotaph of Sir William's 
father, cherishes the family memories with due Amer- 
ican "proceedings." 

IV 

The meeting of the Pepperrell Association was by 
no means the chief excitement of our summer. In 
fact, I do not know that it was an excitement at all; 
and I am sure it was not comparable to the presence 
of our naval squadron, when for four days the mighty 
dragon and kraken shapes of steel, which had crum- 
bled the decrepit pride of Spain in the fight at Santi- 
ago, weltered in our peaceful waters, almost under my 
window. 

I try now to dignify them with handsome epithets; 
but while they were here I had moments of thinking 
they looked like a lot of whited locomotives, which had 
broken through from some trestle, in a recent acci- 
dent, and were waiting the offices of a wrecking-train. 
The poetry of the man-of-war still clings to the " three- 
decker out of the foam " of the past ; it is too soon yet 
for it to have cast a mischievous halo about the modern 
battle-ship; and I looked at the New York and the 
Texas and the Brooklyn and the rest, and thought, 
"Ah, but for you, and our need of proving your dire 
efficiency, perhaps we could have got on with the wick- 
edness of Spanish rule in Cuba, and there had been 
no war!" Under my reluctant eyes the great, dreadful 
spectacle of the Santiago fight displayed itself in peace- 
ful Kittery Harbor. I saw the Spanish ships drive 
upon the reef where a man from Dover, New Hamp- 

260 




SIR WILLIAM PEPPERRELL 



STACCATO NOTES OF A VANISHED SUMMER 

shire, was camping in a little wooden shanty uncon- 
scious; and I heard the dying screams of the Spanish 
sailors, seethed and scalded within the steel walls of 
their own wicked war-kettles. 

As for the guns, battle or no battle, our ships, like 
" kind Lieutenant Belay of the Hot Cross-Bun," seemed 
to be "banging away the whole day long." They set 
a bad example to the dreamy old fort on the Newcas- 
tle shore, which, till they came, only recollected itself 
to salute the sunrise and sunset with a single gun; 
but which, under provocation of the squadron, formed 
a habit of firing twenty or thirty times at noon. 

Other martial shows and noises were not so bad. I 
rather liked seeing the morning drill of the marines 
and the blue-jackets on the iron decks, with the lively 
music that went with it. The bugle calls and the bells 
were charming ; the week's wash hung out to dry had 
its picturesqueness by day, and by night the spectral 
play of the search-lights along the waves and shores, 
and against the startled skies, was even more impres- 
sive. There was a band which gave us every evening 
the airs of the latest coon-songs, and the national an- 
thems which we have borrowed from various nations; 
and yes, I remember the white squadron kindly, though 
I was so glad to have it go, and let us lapse back into 
our summer silence and calm. It was (I do not mind 
saying now) a majestic sight to see those grotesque 
monsters gather themselves together, and go wallow- 
ing, one after another, out of the harbor, and drop be- 
hind the ledge of Whaleback Light, as if they had sunk 
into the sea. 



A deep peace fell upon us when they went, and it 
must have been at this most receptive moment, when all 

261 



LITERATURE AND LIFE 

our sympathies were adjusted in a mood of hospitable 
expectation, that Jim appeared. 

Jim was, and still is, and I hope will long be, a cat ; 
but unless one has lived at Kittery Point, and realized, 
from observation and experience, what a leading part 
cats may play in society, one cannot feel the full im- 
port of this fact. Not only has every house in Kittery 
its cat, but every house seems to have its half-dozen 
cats, large, little, old, and young; of divers colors, 
tending mostly to a dark tortoise-shell. With a whole 
ocean inviting to the tragic rite, I do not believe there 
is ever a kitten drowned in Kittery ; the illimitable sea 
rather employs itself in supplying the fish to which 
"no cat's averse/' but which the cats of Kittery de- 
mand to have cooked. They do not like raw fish; 
they say it plainly, and they prefer to have the bones 
taken out for them, though they do not insist upon that 
point. 

At least, Jim never did so from the time when he first 
scented the odor of delicate young mackerel in the even- 
ing air about our kitchen, and dropped in upon the 
maids there with a fine casual effect of being merely 
out for a walk, and feeling it a neighborly thing to call. 
He had on a silver collar, engraved with his name and 
surname, which offered itself for introduction like a 
visiting-card. He was too polite to ask himself to the 
table at once, but after he had been welcomed to the 
family circle, he formed the habit of finding himself 
with us at breakfast and supper, when he sauntered 
in like one who should say, "Did I smell fish?" but 
would not go further in the way of hinting. 

He had no need to do so. He was made at home, 
and freely invited to our best not only in fish, but in 
chicken, for which he showed a nice taste, and in sweet- 
corn, for which he revealed a most surprising fondness 
when it was cut from the cob for him. After he had 

262 



STACCATO NOTES OF A VANISHED SUMMER 

breakfasted or supped he gracefully suggested that he 
was thirsty by climbing to the table where the water- 
pitcher stood and stretching his fine feline head tow- 
ards it. When he had lapped up his saucer of water, 
he marched into the parlor, and riveted the chains upon 
our fondness by taking the best chair and going to 
sleep in it in attitudes of Egyptian, of Assyrian maj- 
esty. 

His arts were few or none; he rather disdained to 
practise any ; he completed our conquest by maintain- 
ing himself simply a fascinating presence; and per- 
haps we spoiled Jim. It is certain that he came under 
my window at two o'clock one night, and tried the 
kitchen door. It resisted his efforts to get in, and then 
Jim began to use language which I had never heard 
from the lips of a cat before, and seldom from the lips 
of a man. I will not repeat it; enough that it carried 
to the listener the conviction that Jim was not sober. 
Where he could have got his liquor in the totally ab- 
stinent State of Maine I could not positively say, but 
probably of some sailor who had brought it from the 
neighboring New Hampshire coast. There could be 
no doubt, however, that Jim was drunk; and a dash 
from the water-pitcher seemed the only thing for him. 
The water did not touch him, but he started back in 
surprise and grief, and vanished into the night without 
a word. 

His feelings must have been deeply wounded, for it 
was almost a week before he came near us again ; and 
then I think that nothing but young lobster would have 
brought him. He forgave us finally, and made us of 
his party in the quarrel he began gradually to have 
with the large yellow cat of a next-door neighbor. This 
culminated one afternoon, after a long exchange of 
mediaeval defiance and insult, in a battle upon a bed 
of rag-weed, with wild shrieks of rage, and prodigious 

263 



LITERATURE AND LIFE 

feats of ground and lofty tumbling. It seemed to our 
anxious eyes that Jim was getting the worst of it; but 
when we afterwards visited the battle-field and picked 
up several tufts of blond fur, we were in a doubt which 
was afterwards heightened by Jim's invasion of the 
yellow cat's territory, where he stretched himself de- 
fiantly upon the grass and seemed to be challenging 
the yellow cat to come out and try to put him off the 
premises. 



THE ART OF THE ADSMITH 

THE other day, a friend of mine, who professes all 
the intimacy of a bad conscience with many of 
my thoughts and convictions, came in with a bulky 
book under his arm, and said, "I see by a guilty 
look in your eye that you are meaning to write about 
spring/' 

"I am not/' I retorted, "and if I were, it would be 
because none of the new things have been said yet 
about spring, and because spring is never an old story, 
any more than youth or love/' 

"I have heard something like that before," said my 
friend, "and I understand. The simple truth of the 
matter is that this is the fag-end of the season, and you 
have run low in your subjects. Now take my advice 
and don't write about spring; it will make everybody 
hate you, and will do no good. Write about adver- 
tising." He tapped the book under his arm signifi- 
cantly. "Here is a theme for you." 



He had no sooner pronounced these words than I 
began to feel a weird and potent fascination in his sug- 
gestion. I took the book from him and looked it eager- 
ly through. It was called Good Advertising, and it 
was written by one of the experts in the business who 
have advanced it almost to the grade of an art, or a 
humanity. 

265 



LITERATURE AND LIFE 

"But I see nothing here/' I said, musingly, "which 
would enable a self-respecting author to come to the 
help of his publisher in giving due hold upon the pub- 
lic interest those charming characteristics of his book 
which no one else can feel so penetratingly or celebrate 
so persuasively." 

"I expected some such objection from you/' said my 
friend. " You will admit that there is everything else 
here?" 

"Everything but that most essential thing. You 
know how we all feel about it: the bitter disappoint- 
ment, the heart - sickening sense of insufficiency that 
the advertised praises of our books give us poor au- 
thors. The effect is far worse than that of the reviews, 
for the reviewer is not your ally and copartner, while 
your publisher — " 

"I see what you mean," said my friend. "But you 
must have patience. If the author of this book can 
write so luminously of advertising in other respects, I 
am sure he will yet be able to cast a satisfactory light 
upon your problem. The question is, I believe, how 
to translate into irresistible terms all that fond and 
exultant regard which a writer feels for his book, 
all his pervasive appreciation of its singular beauty, 
unique value, and utter charm, and transfer it to print, 
without infringing upon the delicate and shrinking 
modesty which is the distinguishing ornament of the 
literary spirit?" 

"Something like that. But you understand." 

"Perhaps a Rontgen ray might be got to do it," 
said my friend, thoughtfully, "or perhaps this author 
may bring his mind to bear upon it yet. He seems 
to have considered every kind of advertising except 
book-advertising. ' ' 

"The most important of all!" I cried, impatiently. 

"You think so because you are in that line. If 

266 



THE ART OF THE ADSMITH 

you were in the line of varnish, or bicycles, or soap, 
or typewriters, or extract of beef, or of malt — " 

"Still I should be interested in book - advertising, 
because it is the most vital of human interests." 

"Tell me/' said my friend, "do you read the adver- 
tisements of the books of rival authors?' 7 

"Brother authors/' I corrected him. 

"Well, brother authors." 

I said, No, candidly, I did not; and I forbore to 
add that I thought them little better than a waste 
of the publishers' money. 



II 



My friend did not pursue his inquiry to my personal 
disadvantage, but seemed to prefer a more general 
philosophy of the matter. 

"I have often wondered," he said, "at the enormous 
expansion of advertising, and doubted whether it was 
not mostly wasted. But my author, here, has sug- 
gested a brilliant fact which I was unwittingly grop- 
ing for. When you take up a Sunday paper " — I 
shuddered, and my friend smiled intelligence — " you 
are simply appalled at the miles of announcements of 
all sorts. Who can possibly read them? Who cares 
even to look at them? But if you want something in 
particular — to furnish a house, or buy a suburban 
place, or take a steamer for Europe, or go to the the- 
atre — then you find out at once who reads the adver- 
tisements, and cares to look at them. They respond to 
the multifarious wants of the whole community. You 
have before you the living operation of that law of 
demand and supply which it has always been such a 
bore to hear about. As often happens, the supply seems 
to come before the demand ; but that's only an appear- 

267 



LITERATURE AND LIFE 

ance. You wanted something, and you found an offer 
to meet your want." 

" Then you don't believe that the offer to meet your 
want suggested it?" 

"I see that my author believes something of the 
kind. We may be full of all sorts of unconscious 
wants which merely need the vivifying influence of 
an advertisement to make them spring into active 
being; but I have a feeling that the money paid for 
advertising which appeals to potential wants is largely 
thrown away. You must want a thing, or think you 
want it; otherwise you resent the proffer of it as a 
kind of impertinence." 

"There are some kinds of advertisements, all the 
same, that I read without the slightest interest in the 
subject matter. Simply the beauty of the style at- 
tracts me." 

"I know. But does it ever move you to get what 
you don't want?" 

"Never; and I should be glad to know what your 
author thinks of that sort of advertising : the literary, 
or dramatic, or humorous, or quaint." 

"He doesn't contemn it, quite. But I think he 
feels that it may have had its day. Do you still read 
such advertisements with your early zest?" 

"No; the zest for nearly everything goes. I don't 
care so much for Tourguenief as I used. Still, if I 
come upon the jaunty and laconic suggestions of a 
certain well-known clothing - house, concerning the 
season's wear, I read them with a measure of satis- 
faction. The advertising expert — " 

"This author calls him the adsmith." 

"Delightful! Ad is a loathly little word, but we 
must come to it. It's as legitimate as lunch. But 
as I was saying, the adsmith seems to have caught 
the American business tone, as perfectly as any 

268 



THE ART OF THE ADSMITH 

of our novelists have caught the American social 
tone." 

"Yes," said my friend, "and he seems to have pros- 
pered as richly by it. You know some of those chaps 
make fifteen or twenty thousand dollars by adsmith- 
ing. They have put their art quite on a level with 
fiction pecuniarily." 

"Perhaps it is a branch of fiction." 

"No; they claim that it is pure fact. My author 
discourages the slightest admixture of fable. The 
truth, clearly and simply expressed, is the best in an 
ad." 

" It is best in a wof, too. I am always saying that." 

"Wof?" 

" Well, work of fiction. It's another new word, like 
lunch or ad." 

"But in a wof," said my friend, instantly adopting 
it, " my author insinuates that the fashion of payment 
tempts you to verbosity, while in an ad the conditions 
oblige you to the greatest possible succinctness. In 
one case you are paid by the word; in the other you 
pay by the word. That is where the adsmith stands 
upon higher moral ground than the wof smith." 

"I should think your author might have written a 

recent article in The , reproaching fiction with 

its unhallowed gains." 

" If you mean that for a sneer, it is misplaced. He 
would have been incapable of it. My author is no 
more the friend of honesty in adsmithing than he is 
of propriety. He deprecates jocosity in apothecaries 
and undertakers, not only as bad taste, but as bad 
business ; and he is as severe as any one could be upon 
ads that seize the attention by disgusting or shocking 
the reader. 

" He is to be praised for that, and for the other thing ; 
and I shouldn't have minded his criticising the ready 

269 



LITERATURE AND LIFE 

wofsmith. I hope he attacks the use of display type, 
which makes our newspapers look like the poster- 
plastered fences around vacant lots. In New York 
there is only one paper whose advertisements are not 
typographically a shock to the nerves." 

"Well," said my friend, "he attacks foolish and 
ineffective display." 

"It is all foolish and ineffective. It is like a crowd 
of people trying to make themselves heard by shouting 
each at the top of his voice. A paper full of display 
advertisements is an image of our whole congested 
and delirious state of competition; but even in com- 
petitive conditions it is unnecessary, and it is futile. 
Compare any New York paper but one with the Lon- 
don papers, and you will see what I mean. Of course 
I refer to the ad pages ; the rest of our exception is as 
offensive with pictures and scare - heads as all the 
rest. I wish your author could revise his opinions 
and condemn all display in ads." 

"I dare say he will when he knows what you think," 
said my friend, with imaginable sarcasm. 



Ill 

"I wish," I went on, "that he would give us some 
philosophy of the prodigious increase of advertising 
within the last twenty-five years, and some conjecture 
as to the end of it all. Evidently, it can't keep on 
increasing at the present rate. If it does, there will 
presently be no room in the world for things; it will 
be filled up with the advertisements of things." 

"Before that time, perhaps," my friend suggested, 
"adsmi thing will have become so fine and potent an 
art that advertising will be reduced in bulk, while keep- 
ing all its energy and even increasing its effectiveness." 

270 



THE ART OF THE ADSMITH 

"Perhaps/' I said, "some silent electrical process 
will be contrived, so that the attractions of a new line 
of dress -goods or the fascination of a spring or fall 
opening may be imparted to a lady's consciousness 
without even the agency of words. All other facts 
of commercial and industrial interest could be dealt 
with in the same way. A fine thrill could be made 
to go from the last new book through the whole com- 
munity, so that people would not willingly rest till 
they had it. Yes, one can see an indefinite future 
for advertising in that way. The adsmith may be 
the supreme artist of the twentieth century. He may 
assemble in his grasp, and employ at will, all the arts 
and sciences." 

"Yes," said my friend, with a sort of fall in his 
voice, "that is very well. But what is to become of 
the race when it is penetrated at every pore with a 
sense of the world's demand and supply?" 

" Oh, that is another affair. I was merely imagining 
the possible resources of invention in providing for the 
increase of advertising while guarding the integrity of 
the planet. I think, very likely, if the thing keeps 
on, we shall all go mad ; but then we shall none of us 
be able to criticise the others. Or possibly the thing 
may work its own cure. You know the ingenuity 
of the political economists in justifying the egotism 
to which conditions appeal. They do not deny that 
these foster greed and rapacity in merciless degree, 
but they contend that when the wealth-winner drops 
off gorged there is a kind of miracle wrought, and 
good comes of it all. I never could see how; but if it 
is true, why shouldn't a sort of ultimate immunity 
come back to us from the very excess and invasion of 
the appeals now made to us, and destined to be made 
to us still more by the adsmith? Come, isn't there 
hope in that?" 

271 



LITERATURE AND LIFE 

" I see a great opportunity for the wof smith in some 
such dream/' said my friend. "Why don't you turn 
it to account?" 

"You know that isn't my line; I must leave that 
sort of wofsmithing to the romantic novelist. Be- 
sides, I have my well-known panacea for all the ills 
our state is heir to, in a civilization which shall leg- 
islate foolish and vicious and ugly and adulterate 
things out of the possibility of existence. Most of 
the adsmithing is now employed in persuading people 
that such things are useful, beautiful, and pure. But 
in my civilization they shall not even be suffered to 
be made, much less foisted upon the community by 
adsmiths." 

"I see what you mean," said my friend; and he 
sighed gently. "I had much better let you write 
about spring," 



THE PSYCHOLOGY OF PLAGIARISM 

A LATE incident in the history of a very wide- 
spread English novelist, triumphantly closed by 
the statement of his friend that the novelist had casual- 
ly failed to accredit a given passage in his novel to the 
real author, has brought freshly to my mind a curious 
question in ethics. The friend who vindicated the nov- 
elist, or, rather, who contemptuously dismissed the 
matter, not only confessed the fact of adoption, but de- 
clared that it was one of many which could be found in 
the novelist's works. The novelist, he said, was quite 
in the habit of so using material in the rough, which 
he implied was like using any fact or idea from life, 
and he declared that the novelist could not bother 
to answer critics who regarded these exploitations 
as a sort of depredation. In a manner he brushed 
the impertinent accusers aside, assuring the general 
public that the novelist always meant, at his leisure, 
and in his own way, duly to ticket the flies preserved 
in his amber. 



When I read this haughty vindication, I thought 
at first that if the case were mine I would rather have 
several deadly enemies than such a friend as that; 
but since, I have not been so sure. I have asked my- 
self upon a careful review of the matter whether pla- 
giarism may not be frankly avowed, as in nowise 
18 273 



LITERATURE AND LIFE 

dishonest, and I wish some abler casuist would take 
the affair into consideration and make it clear for 
me. If we are to suppose that offences against society- 
disgrace the offender, and that public dishonor argues 
the fact of some such offence, then apparently pla- 
giarism is not such an offence ; for in even very flagrant 
cases it does not disgrace. The dictionary, indeed, 
defines it as "the crime of literary theft"; but as no 
penalty attaches to it, and no lasting shame, it is hard 
to believe it either a crime or a theft ; and the offence, 
if it is an offence (one has to call it something, and I 
hope the word is not harsh), is some such harmless 
infraction of the moral law as white-lying. 

The much-perverted saying of Moliere, that he took 
his own where he found it, is perhaps in the conscious- 
ness of those who appropriate the things other people 
have rushed in with before them. But really they seem 
to need neither excuse nor defence with the impartial 
public if they are caught in the act of reclaiming their 
property or despoiling the rash intruder upon their 
premises. The novelist in question is by no means 
the only recent example, and is by no means a flagrant 
example. While the ratification of the treaty with 
Spain was pending before the Senate of the United 
States, a member of that body opposed it in a speech 
almost word for word the same as a sermon delivered 
in New York City only a few days earlier and published 
broadcast. He was promptly exposed by the parallel- 
column system ; but I have never heard that his stand- 
ing was affected or his usefulness impaired by the 
offence proven against him. A few years ago an 
eminent divine in one of our cities preached as his own 
the sermon of a brother divine, no longer living ; he, too, 
was detected and promptly exposed by the parallel- 
column system, but nothing whatever happened from 
the exposure. Every one must recall like instances, 

274 



THE PSYCHOLOGY OF PLAGIARISM 

more or less remote. I remember one within my youth- 
fuller knowledge of a journalist who used as his own 
all the denunciatory passages of Macaulay's article 
on Barrere, and applied them with changes of name 
to the character and conduct of a local politician whom 
he felt it his duty to devote to infamy. He was caught 
in the fact, and by means of the parallel column pil- 
loried before the community. But the community did 
not mind it a bit, and the journalist did not either. 
He prospered on amid those who all knew what he 
had done, and when he removed to another city it 
was to a larger one, and to a position of more com- 
manding influence, from which he was long conspicu- 
ous in helping shape the destinies of the nation. 

So far as any effect from these exposures was con- 
cerned, they were as harmless as those exposures of 
fraudulent spiritistic mediums which from time to 
time are supposed to shake the spiritistic superstition 
to its foundations. They really do nothing of the 
kind; the table-tippings, rappings, materializations, 
and levitations keep on as before ; and I do not believe 
that the exposure of the novelist who has been the 
latest victim of the parallel column will injure him a 
jot in the hearts or heads of his readers. 



II 

I am very glad of it, being a disbeliever in punish- 
ments of all sorts. I am always glad to have sinners 
get off, for I like to get off from my own sins ; and I have 
a bad moment from my sense of them whenever an- 
other's have found him out. But as yet I have not 
convinced myself that the sort of thing we have been 
considering is a sin at all, for it seems to deprave no 
more than it dishonors ; or that it is what the dictionary 

275 



LITERATURE AND LIFE 

(with very unnecessary brutality) calls a " crime " 
and a "theft." If it is either, it is differently condi- 
tioned, if not differently natured, from all other crimes 
and thefts. These may be more or less artfully and 
hopefully concealed, but plagiarism carries inevitable 
detection with it. If you take a man's hat or coat out 
of his hall, you may pawn it before the police overtake 
you; if you take his horse out of his stable, you may 
ride it away beyond pursuit and sell it ; if you take his 
purse out of his pocket, j^ou may pass it to a pal in the 
crowd, and easily prove your innocence. But if you 
take his sermon, or his essay, or even his apposite re- 
flection, you cannot escape discovery. The world is 
full of idle people reading books, and they are only too 
glad to act as detectives; they please their miserable 
vanity by showing their alertness, and are proud to 
bear witness against you in the court of parallel col- 
umns. You have no safety in the obscurity of the 
author from whom you take your own ; there is always 
that most terrible reader, the reader of one book, who 
knows that very author, and will the more indecently 
hasten to bring you to the bar because he knows no 
other, and wishes to display his erudition. A man 
may escape for centuries and yet be found out: In 
the notorious case of William Shakespeare the offender 
seemed finally secure of his prey; and yet one poor 
lady, who ended in a lunatic asylum, was able to detect 
him at last, and to restore the goods to their rightful 
owner, Sir Francis Bacon. 

In spite, however, of this almost absolute certainty 
of exposure, plagiarism goes on as it has always gone 
on ; and there is no probability that it will cease as long 
as there are novelists, senators, divines, and journal- 
ists hard pressed for ideas which they happen not to 
have in mind at the time, and which they see going to 
waste elsewhere. Now and then it takes a more vio- 

276 



THE PSYCHOLOGY OF PLAGIARISM 

lent form and becomes a real mania, as when the plagi- 
arist openly claims and urges his right to a well-known 
piece of literary property. When Mr. William Allen 
Butler's famous poem of "Nothing to Wear " achieved 
its extraordinary popularity, a young girl declared and 
apparently quite believed that she had written it and 
lost the MS. in an omnibus. All her friends appar- 
ently believed so, too ; and the friends of the different 
gentlemen and ladies who claimed the authorship 
of "Beautiful Snow" and "Rock Me to Sleep" were 
ready to support them by affidavit against the real 
authors of those pretty worthless pieces. 

From all these facts it must appear to the philosophic 
reader that plagiarism is not the simple " crime " or 
" theft " that the lexicographers would have us believe. 
It argues a strange and peculiar courage on the part 
of those who commit it or indulge it, since they are sure 
of having it brought home to them, for they seem to 
dread the exposure, though it involves no punishment 
outside of themselves. Why do they do it, or, having 
done it, why do they mind it, since the public does not? 
Their temerity and their timidity are things almost 
irreconcilable, and the whole position leaves one quite 
puzzled as to what one would do if one's own pla- 
giarisms were found out. But this is a mere question 
of conduct, and of infinitely less interest than that of 
the nature or essence of the thing itself. 



PURITANISM IN AMERICAN FICTION 

THE question whether the fiction which gives a 
vivid impression of reality does truly represent 
the conditions studied in it, is one of those inquiries 
to which there is no very final answer. The most 
baffling fact of such fiction is that its truths are self- 
evident; and if you go about to prove them you are in 
some danger of shaking the convictions of those whom 
they have persuaded. It will not do to affirm any- 
thing wholesale concerning them; a hundred exam- 
ples to the contrary present themselves if you know 
the ground, and you are left in doubt of the verity which 
you cannot gainsay. The most that }^ou can do is to 
appeal to your own consciousness, and that is not 
proof to anybody else. Perhaps the best test in this 
difficult matter is the quality of the art which created 
the picture. Is it clear, simple, unaffected? Is it true 
to human experience generally? If it is so, then it 
cannot well be false to the special human experience it 
deals with. 



Not long ago I heard of something which amus- 
ingly, which pathetically, illustrated the sense of real- 
ity imparted by the work of one of our writers, whose 
art is of the kind I mean. A lady was driving with a 
young girl of the lighter-minded civilization of New 
York through one of those little towns of the North 

278 



PURITANISM IN AMERICAN FICTION 

Shore in Massachusetts, where the small, wooden 
houses cling to the edges of the shallow bay, and the 
schooners slip in and out on the hidden channels of 
the salt meadows as if they were blown about through 
the tall grass. She tried to make her feel the shy charm 
of the place, that almost subjective beauty, which those 
to the manner born are so keenly aware of in old-fash- 
ioned New England villages; but she found that the 
girl was not only not looking at the sad-colored cot- 
tages, with their weather-worn shingle walls, their 
grassy door-yards lit by patches of summer bloom, 
and their shutterless windows with their close-drawn 
shades, but she was resolutely averting her eyes from 
them, and staring straightforward until she should be 
out of sight of them altogether. She said that they 
were terrible, and she knew that in each of them was 
one of those dreary old women, or disappointed girls, 
or unhappy wives, or bereaved mothers, she had read 
of in Miss Wilkins's stories. 

She had been too little sensible of the humor which 
forms the relief of these stories, as it forms the relief 
of the bare, duteous, conscientious, deeply individ- 
ualized lives portrayed in them; and no doubt this 
cannot make its full appeal to the heart of youth ach- 
ing for their stoical sorrows. Without being so very 
young, I, too, have found the humor hardly enough 
at times, and if one has not the habit of experiencing 
support in tragedy itself, one gets through a remote 
New England village, at nightfall, say, rather limp 
than otherwise, and in quite the mood that Miss Wil- 
kins's bleaker studies leave one in. At mid-day, or 
in the bright sunshine of the morning, it is quite pos- 
sible to fling off the melancholy which breathes the 
same note in the fact and the fiction ; and I have even 
had some pleasure at such times in identifying this 
or that one-story cottage with its lean-to as a Mary 

279 



LITERATURE AND LIFE 

Wilkins house and in placing one of her muted dramas 
in it. One cannot know the people of such places 
without recognizing her types in them, and one cannot 
know New England without owning the fidelity of 
her stories to New England character, though, as I 
have already suggested, quite another sort of stories 
could be written which should as faithfully repre- 
sent other phases of New England village life. 

To the alien inquirer, however, I should be by no 
means confident that their truth would evince itself, 
for the reason that human nature is seldom on show 
anywhere. I am perfectly certain of the truth of Tol- 
stoy and Tourguenief to Russian life, yet I should not 
be surprised if I went through Russia and met none 
of their people. I should be rather more surprised if 
I went through Italy and met none of Verga's or Fo- 
gazzaro's, but that would be because I already knew 
Italy a little. In fact, I suspect that the last delight 
of truth in any art comes only to the connoisseur who 
is as well acquainted with the subject as the artist him- 
self. One must not be too severe in challenging the 
truth of an author to life ; and one must bring a great 
deal of sympathy and a great deal of patience to the 
scrutiny. Tj^pes are very backward and shrinking 
things, after all; character is of such a mimosan sen- 
sibility that if you seize it too abruptly its leaves are 
apt to shut and hide all that is distinctive in it ; so that 
it is not without some risk to an author's reputation 
for honesty that he gives his readers the impression of 
his truth. 

II 

The difficulty with characters in fiction is that the 
reader there finds them dramatized; not only their 
actions, but also their emotions are dramatized; and 

280 



PURITANISM IN AMERICAN FICTION 

the very same sort of persons when one meets them in 
real life are recreantly undramatic. One might go 
through a New England village and see Mary Wilkins 
houses and Mary Wilkins people, and yet not witness 
a scene nor hear a word such as one finds in her tales. 
It is only too probable that the inhabitants one met 
would say nothing quaint or humorous, or betray at 
all the nature that she reveals in them ; and yet I should 
not question her revelation on that account. The life 
of New England, such as Miss Wilkins deals with, and 
Miss Sarah 0. Jewett, and Miss Alice Brown, is not on 
the surface, or not visibly so, except to the accustomed 
eye. It is Puritanism scarcely animated at all by the 
Puritanic theology. One must not be very positive 
in such things, and I may be too bold in venturing to 
say that while the belief of some New-Englanders ap- 
proaches this theology the belief of most is now far 
from it ; and yet its penetrating individualism so deep- 
ly influenced the New England character that Puri- 
tanism survives in the moral and mental make of the 
people almost in its early strength. Conduct and 
manner conform to a dead religious ideal; the wish 
to be sincere, the wish to be just, the wish to be right- 
eous are before the wish to be kind, merciful, humble. 
A people are not a chosen people for half a dozen gen- 
erations without acquiring a spiritual pride that re- 
mains with them long after they cease to believe them- 
selves chosen. They are often stiffened in the neck 
and they are often hardened in the heart by it, to the 
point of making them angular and cold; but they are 
of an inveterate responsibility to a power higher than 
themselves, and they are strengthened for any fate. 
They are what we see in the stories which, perhaps, 
hold the first place in American fiction. 

As a matter of fact, the religion of New England is 
not now so Puritanical as that of many parts of the 

281 



LITERATURE AND LIFE 

South and West, and yet the inherited Puritanism 
stamps the New England manner, and differences it 
from the manner of the straightest sects elsewhere. 
There was, however, always a revolt against Puritan- 
ism when Puritanism was severest and securest; this 
resulted in types of shiftlessness if not wickedness, 
which have not yet been duly studied, and which would 
make the fortune of some novelist who cared to do a 
fresh thing. There is also a sentimentality, or pseudo- 
emotionality (I have not the right phrase for it), which 
awaits full recognition in fiction. This efflorescence 
from the dust of systems and creeds, carried into nat- 
ures left vacant by the ancestral doctrine, has scarce- 
ly been noticed by the painters of New England man- 
ners. It is often a last state of Unitarianism, which 
prevailed in the larger towns and cities when the Cal- 
vinistic theology ceased to be dominant, and it is often 
an effect of the spiritualism so common in New Eng- 
land, and, in fact, everywhere in America. Then, 
there is a wide-spread love of literature in the country 
towns and villages which has in great measure re- 
placed the old interest in dogma, and which forms 
with us an author's closest appreciation, if not his 
best. But as yet little hint of all this has got into the 
short stories, and still less of that larger intellectual 
life of New England, or that exalted beauty of char- 
acter which tempts one to say that Puritanism was a 
blessing if it made the New-Englanders what they are; 
though one can always be glad not to have lived among 
them in the disciplinary period. Boston, the capital 
of that New England nation which is fast losing itself 
in the American nation, is no longer of its old literary 
primacy, and yet most of our right thinking, our high 
thinking, still begins there, and qualifies the thinking 
of the country at large. The good causes, the generous 
causes, are first befriended there, and in a wholesome 

282 



PURITANISM IN AMERICAN FICTION 

sort the New England culture, as well as the New Eng- 
land conscience, has imparted itself to the American 
people. 

Even the power of writing short stories, which we 
suppose ourselves to have in such excellent degree, 
has spread from New England. That is, indeed, the 
home of the American short story, and it has there been 
brought to such perfection in the work of Miss Wil- 
kins, of Miss Jewett, of Miss Brown, and of that most 
faithful, forgotten painter of manners, Mrs. Rose Terry 
Cook, that it presents upon the whole a truthful picture 
of New England village life in some of its more obvious 
phases. I say obvious because I must, but I have al- 
ready said that this is a life which is very little obvious ; 
and I should not blame any one who brought the por- 
trait to the test of reality, and found it exaggerated, 
overdrawn, and unnatural, though I should be per- 
fectly sure that such a critic was wrong. 



THE WHAT AND THE HOW IN ART 

ONE of the things always enforcing itself upon 
the consciousness of the artist in any sort is 
the fact that those whom artists work for rarely care 
for their work artistically. They care for it morally, 
personally, partially. I suspect that criticism itself 
has rather a muddled preference for the what over the 
how, and that it is always haunted by a philistine 
question of the material when it should, aesthetically 
speaking, be concerned solely with the form. 



The other night at the theatre I was witness of a 
curious and amusing illustration of my point. They 
were playing a most soul -filling melodrama, of the 
sort which gives you assurance from the very first 
that there will be no trouble in the end, but everything 
will come out just as it should, no matter what ob- 
stacles oppose themselves in the course of the action. 
An over-ruling Providence, long accustomed to the 
exigencies of the stage, could not fail to intervene at 
the critical moment in behalf of innocence and virtue, 
and the spectator never had the least occasion for 
anxiety. Not unnaturally there was a black-hearted 
villain in the piece; so very black-hearted that he 
seemed not to have a single good impulse from first 
to last. Yet he was, in the keeping of the stage Prov- 
idence, as harmless as a blank cartridge, in spite 

284 



THE WHAT AND THE HOW IN ART 

of his deadly aims. He accomplished no more mis- 
chief, in fact, than if all his intents had been of the 
best; except for the satisfaction afforded by the edi- 
fying spectacle of his defeat and shame, he need not 
have been in the play at all; and one might almost 
have felt sorry for him, he was so continually baffled. 
But this was not enough for the audience, or for that 
part of it which filled the gallery to the roof. Perhaps 
he was such an uncommonly black-hearted villain, 
so very, very cold-blooded in his wickedness that the 
justice unsparingly dealt out to him by the dramatist 
could not suffice. At any rate, the gallery took such 
a vivid interest in his punishment that it had out 
the actor who impersonated the wretch between all 
the acts, and hissed him throughout his deliberate 
passage across the stage before the curtain. The 
hisses were not at all for the actor, but altogether for 
the character. The performance was fairly good, 
quite as good as the performance of any virtuous part 
in the piece, and easily up to the level of other villan- 
ous performances (I never find much nature in them, 
perhaps because there is not much nature in villany 
itself ; that is, villany pure and simple) ; but the mere 
conception of the wickedness this bad man had at- 
tempted was too much for an audience of the aver- 
age popular goodness. It was only after he had taken 
poison, and fallen dead before their eyes, that the 
spectators forbore to visit him with a lively proof of 
their abhorrence ; apparently they did not care to " give 
him a realizing sense that there was a punishment 
after death/' as the man in Lincoln's story did with 
the dead dog. 

II 

The whole affair was very amusing at first, but it 
has since put me upon thinking (I like to be put upon 

285 



LITERATURE AND LIFE 

thinking ; the eighteenth-century essayists were) that 
the attitude of the audience towards this deplorable 
reprobate is really the attitude of most readers of 
books, lookers at pictures and statues, listeners to 
music, and so on through the whole list of the arts. 
It is absolutely different from the artist's attitude, 
from the connoisseur's attitude; it is quite irreconcil- 
able with their attitude, and yet I wonder if in the end 
it is not what the artist works for. Art is not produced 
for artists, or even for connoisseurs; it is produced 
for the general, who can never view it otherwise than 
morally, personally, partially, from their associations 
and preconceptions. 

Whether the effect with the general is what the artist 
works for or not, he does not succeed without it. Their 
brute liking or misliking is the final test; it is uni- 
versal suffrage that elects, after all. Only, in some 
cases of this sort the polls do not close at four o'clock on 
the first Tuesday after the first Monday of November, 
but remain open forever, and the voting goes on. Still, 
even the first day's canvass is important, or at least 
significant. It will not do for the artist to electioneer, 
but if he is beaten, he ought to ponder the causes of 
his defeat, and question how he has failed to touch 
the chord of universal interest. He is in the world 
to make beauty and truth evident to his fellow-men, 
who are as a rule incredibly stupid and ignorant of 
both, but whose judgment he must nevertheless not 
despise. If he can make something that they will 
cheer, or something that they will hiss, he may not 
have done any great thing, but if he has made some- 
thing that they will neither cheer nor hiss, he may 
well have his misgivings, no matter how well, how 
finely, how truly he has done the thing. 

This is very humiliating, but a tacit snub to one's 
artist-pride such as one gets from public silence is 

286 



THE WHAT AND THE HOW IN ART 

not a bad thing for one. Not long ago I was talking 
about pictures with a painter, a very great painter, 
to my thinking; one whose pieces give me the same 
feeling I have from reading poetry; and I was ex- 
cusing myself to him with respect to art, and perhaps 
putting on a little more modesty than I felt. I said 
that I could enjoy pictures only on the literary side, 
and could get no answer from my soul to those ex- 
cellences of handling and execution which seemed 
chiefly to interest painters. He replied that it was a 
confession of weakness in a painter if he appealed 
merely or mainly to technical knowledge in the spec- 
tator ; that he narrowed his field and dwarfed his work 
by it; and that if he painted for painters merely, or 
for the connoisseurs of painting, he was denying his 
office, which was to say something clear and appreci- 
able to all sorts of men in the terms of art. He even 
insisted that a picture ought to tell a story. 

The difficulty in humbling one's self to this view of 
art is in the ease with which one may please the gen- 
eral by art which is no art. Neither the play nor 
the playing that I saw at the theatre when the actor 
was hissed for the wickedness of the villain he was 
personating, was at all fine; and yet I perceived, on 
reflection, that they had achieved a supreme effect. If 
I may be so confidential, I will say that I should be 
very sorry to have written that piece; yet I should be 
very proud if, on the level I chose and with the quality 
I cared for, I could invent a villain that the populace 
would have out and hiss for his surpassing wicked- 
ness. In other words, I think it a thousand pities 
whenever an artist gets so far away from the general, 
so far within himself or a little circle of amateurs, that 
his highest and best work awakens no response in 
the multitude. I am afraid this is rather the danger 
of the arts among us, and how to escape it is not so 

287 



LITERATURE AND LIFE 

very plain. It makes one sick and sorry often to see 
how cheaply the applause of the common people is 
won. It is not an infallible test of merit, but if it is 
wanting to any performance, we may be pretty sure 
it is not the greatest performance. 



Ill 

The paradox lies in wait here, as in most other hu- 
man affairs, to confound us, and we try to baffle it, 
in this way and in that. We talk, for instance, of 
poetry for poets, and we fondly imagine that this is 
different from talking of cookery for cooks. Poetry is 
not made for poets; they have enough poetry of their 
own, but it is made for people who are not poets. If 
it does not please these, it may still be poetry, but it 
is poetry which has failed of its truest office. It is 
none the less its truest office because some very wretch- 
ed verse seems often to do it. 

The logic of such a fact is not that the poet should 
try to achieve this truest office of his art by means of 
doggerel, but that he should study how and where 
and why the beauty and the truth he has made manifest 
are wanting in universal interest, in human appeal. 
Leaving the drama out of the question, and the theatre 
which seems now to be seeking only the favor of the 
dull rich, I believe that there never was a time or a 
race more open to the impressions of beauty and of 
truth than ours. The artist who feels their divine 
charm, and longs to impart it, has now and here a 
chance to impart it more widely than ever artist had 
in the world before. Of course, the means of reach- 
ing the widest range of humanity are the simple and 
the elementary, but there is no telling when the com- 
plex and the recondite may not universally please. 

288 



THE WHAT AND THE HOW IN ART 

The art is to make them plain to every one, for every- 
one has them in him. Lowell used to say that Shake- 
speare was subtle, but in letters a foot high. 

The painter, sculptor, or author who pleases the 
polite only has a success to be proud of as far as it 
goes, and to be ashamed of that it goes no further. 
He need not shrink from giving pleasure to the vulgar 
because bad art pleases them. It is part of his reason 
for being that he should please them, too; and if he 
does not it is a proof that he is wanting in force, how- 
ever much he abounds in fineness. Who would not 
wish his picture to draw a crowd about it? Who would 
not wish his novel to sell five hundred thousand copies, 
for reasons besides the sordid love of gain which I 
am told governs novelists? One should not really 
wish it any the less because chromos and historical 
romances are popular. 

Sometime, I believe, the artist and his public will 
draw nearer together in a mutual understanding, 
though perhaps not in our present conditions. I put 
that understanding off till the good time when life 
shall be more than living, more even than the question 
of getting a living; but in the mean time I think that 
the artist might very well study the springs of feeling 
in others; and if I were a dramatist I think I should 
quite humbly go to that play where they hiss the villain 
for his villany, and inquire how his wickedness had 
been made so appreciable, so vital, so personal. Not 
being a dramatist, I still cannot indulge the greatest 
contempt of that play and its public. 

»9 



POLITICS OF AMERICAN AUTHORS 

NO thornier theme could well be suggested than I 
was once invited to consider by an Englishman 
who wished to know how far American politicians were 
scholars, and how far American authors took part in 
politics. In my mind I first revolted from the inquiry, 
and then I cast about, in the fascination it began to 
have for me, to see how I might handle it and prick 
myself least. In a sort, which it would take too long 
to set forth, politics are very intimate matters with us, 
and if one were to deal quite frankly with the politics 
of a contemporary author, one might accuse one's self 
of an unwarrantable personality. So, in what I shall 
have to say in answer to the question asked me, I shall 
seek above all things not to be quite frank. 



My uncandor need not be so jealously guarded in 
speaking of authors no longer living. Not to go too 
far back among these, it is perfectly safe to say that 
when the slavery question began to divide all kinds 
of men among us, Lowell, Longfellow, Whittier, Cur- 
tis, Emerson, and Bryant more or less promptly and 
openly took sides against slavery. Holmes was very 
much later in doing so, but he made up for his long 
delay by his final strenuousness ; as for Hawthorne, he 
was, perhaps, too essentially a spectator of life to be 

290 



POLITICS OF AMERICAN AUTHORS 

classed with either party, though his associations, if not 
his sympathies, were with the Northern men who had 
Southern principles until the civil war came. After 
the war, when our political questions ceased to be 
moral and emotional and became economic and socio- 
logical, literary men found their standing with greater 
difficulty. They remained mostly Republicans, ' be- 
cause the Republicans were the anti-slavery party, 
and were still waging war against slavery in their 
nerves. 

I should say that they also continued very largely 
the emotional tradition in politics, and it is doubtful 
if in the nature of things the politics of literary men 
can ever be otherwise than emotional. In fact, though 
the questions may no longer be so, the politics of vast- 
ly the greater number of Americans are so. Nothing 
else would account for the fact that during the last 
ten or fifteen years men have remained Republicans 
and remained Democrats upon no tangible issues ex- 
cept of office, which could practically concern only a 
few hundreds or thousands out of every million voters. 
Party fealty is praised as a virtue, and disloyalty to 
party is treated as a species of incivism next in wicked- 
ness to treason. If any one were to ask me why then 
American authors were not active in American politics, 
as they once were, I should feel a certain diffidence in 
replying that the question of other people's accession 
to office was, however emotional, unimportant to them 
as compared with literary questions. I should have 
the more diffidence because it might be retorted that 
literary men were too unpractical for politics when 
they did not deal with moral issues. 

Such a retort would be rather mild and civil, as 
things go, and might even be regarded as compliment- 
ary. It is not our custom to be tender with any one 
who doubts if any actuality is right, or might not be 

291 



LITERATURE AND LIFE 

bettered, especially in public affairs. We are apt to 
call such a one out of his name and to punish him for 
opinions he has never held. This may be a better 
reason than either given why authors do not take part 
in politics with us. They are a thin-skinned race, fas- 
tidious often, and always averse to hard knocks ; they 
are rather modest, too, and distrust their fitness to lead, 
when they have quite a firm faith in their convictions. 
They hesitate to urge these in the face of practical 
politicians, who have a confidence in their ability to 
settle all affairs of State not surpassed even by that of 
business men in dealing with economic questions. 

I think it is a pity that our authors do not go into 
politics at least for the sake of the material it would 
yield them; but really they do not. Our politics are 
often vulgar, but they are very picturesque; yet, so 
far, our fiction has shunned them even more decidedly 
than it has shunned our good society — which is not 
picturesque or apparently anything but a tiresome 
adaptation of the sort of drama that goes on abroad 
under the same name. In nearly the degree that our 
authors have dealt with our politics as material, they 
have given the practical politicians only too much rea- 
son to doubt their insight and their capacity to un- 
derstand the mere machinery, the simplest motives, of 
political life. 



There are exceptions, of course, and if my promise 
of reticence did not withhold me I might name some 
striking ones. Privately and unprof essionally, I think 
our authors take as vivid an interest in public affairs 
as any other class of our citizens, and I should be sorry 
to think that they took a less intelligent interest. Now 
and then, but only very rarely, one of them speaks out, 

292 



POLITICS OF AMERICAN AUTHORS 

and usually on the unpopular side. In this event he 
is spared none of the penalties with which we like to 
visit difference of opinion; rather they are accumu- 
lated on him. 

Such things are not serious, and they are such as 
no serious man need shrink from, but they have a bear- 
ing upon what I am trying to explain, and in a certain 
measure they account for a certain attitude in our lit- 
erary men. No one likes to have stones, not to say 
mud, thrown at him, though they are not meant to 
hurt him badly and may be partly thrown in joke. 
But it is pretty certain that if a man not in politics takes 
them seriously, he will have more or less mud, not to 
say stones, thrown at him. He might burlesque or 
caricature them, or misrepresent them, with safety; 
but if he spoke of public questions with heart and con- 
science, he could not do it with impunity, unless he 
were authorized to do so by some practical relation to 
them. I do not mean that then he would escape; but 
in this country, where there were once supposed to be 
no classes, people are more strictly classified than in 
any other. Business to the business man, law to the 
lawyer, medicine to the physician, politics to the poli- 
tician, and letters to the literary man ; that is the rule. 
One is not expected to transcend his function, and 
commonly one does not. We keep each to his last, as 
if there were not human interests, civic interests, which 
had a higher claim than the last upon our thinking 
and feeling. The tendency has grown upon us sev- 
erally and collectively through the long persistence of 
our prosperity; if public affairs were going ill, private 
affairs were going so well that we did not mind the 
others; and we Americans are, I think, meridional in 
our improvidence. We are so essentially of to-day 
that we behave as if to-morrow no more concerned us 
than yesterday. We have taught ourselves to believe 

293 



LITERATURE AND LIFE 

that it will all come out right in the end so long that 
we have come to act. upon our belief ; we are optimistic 
fatalists. 

Ill 

The turn which our politics have taken towards 
economics, if I may so phrase the rise of the questions 
of labor and capital, has not largely attracted literary 
men. It is doubtful whether Edward Bellamy him- 
self, whose fancy of better conditions has become the 
abiding faith of vast numbers of Americans, supposed 
that he was entering the field of practical politics, or 
dreamed of influencing elections by his hopes of eco- 
nomic equality. But he virtually founded the Populist 
party, which, as the vital principle of the Democratic 
party, came so near electing its candidate for the Presi- 
dency some years ago; and he is to be named first 
among our authors who have dealt with politics on their 
more human side since the days of the old anti-slavery 
agitation. Without too great disregard of the reticence 
concerning the living which I promised myself, I may 
mention Dr. Edward Everett Hale and Colonel Thomas 
Wentworth Higginson as prominent authors who en- 
couraged the Nationalist movement eventuating in 
Populism, though they were never Populists. It may 
be interesting to note that Dr. Hale and Colonel Hig- 
ginson, who later came together in their sociological 
sympathies, were divided by the schism of 1884, when 
the first remained with the Republicans and the last 
went off to the Democrats. More remotely, Colonel 
Higginson was anti - slavery almost to the point of 
Abolitionism, and he led a negro regiment in the war. 
Dr. Hale was of those who were less radically opposed 
to slavery before the war, but hardly so after it came. 
Since the war a sort of refluence of the old anti-slavery 

294 



POLITICS OF AMERICAN AUTHORS 

politics carried from his moorings in Southern tradi- 
tion Mr. George W. Cable, who, against the white sen- 
timent of his section, sided with the former slaves, and 
would, if the indignant renunciation of his fellow- 
Southerners could avail, have consequently ceased to 
be the first of Southern authors, though he would still 
have continued the author of at least one of the greatest 
American novels. 

If I must burn my ships behind me in alleging these 
modern instances, as I seem really to be doing, I may 
mention Mr. R. W. Gilder, the poet, as an author who 
has taken part in the politics of municipal reform. 
Mr. Hamlin Garland has been known from the first as 
a zealous George man, or single-taxer. Mr. John Hay, 
Mr. Theodore Roosevelt, and Mr. Henry Cabot Lodge 
are Republican politicians, as well as recognized liter- 
ary men. Mr. Joel Chandler Harris, when not writing 
Uncle Remus, writes political articles in a leading 
Southern journal. Mark Twain is a leading anti-im- 
perialist. 

IV 

I am not sure whether I have made out a case for 
our authors or against them ; perhaps I have not done 
so badly ; but I have certainly not tried to be exhaust- 
ive; the exhaustion is so apt to extend from the sub- 
ject to the reader, and I wish to leave him in a condition 
to judge for himself whether American literary men 
take part in American politics or not. I think they 
bear their share, in the quieter sort of way which we 
hope (it may be too fondly) is the American way. They 
are none of them politicians in the Latin sort. Few, 
if any, of our statesmen have come forward with small 
volumes of verse in their hands as they used to do in 
Spain ; none of our poets or historians have been chosen 

295 



LITERATURE AND LIFE 

Presidents of the republic as has happened to their 
French confreres ; no great novelist of ours has been 
exiled as Victor Hugo was, or atrociously mishandled 
as Zola has been, though I have no doubt that if, for 
instance, one had once said the Spanish war wrong he 
would be pretty generally conspue. They have none of 
them reached the heights of political power, as several 
English authors have done; but they have often been 
ambassadors, ministers, and consuls, though they may 
not often have been appointed for political reasons. 
I fancy they discharge their duties in voting rather 
faithfully, though they do not often take part in cau- 
cuses or conventions. 

As for the other half of the question — how far Amer- 
ican politicians are scholars — one's first impulse would 
be to say that they never were so. But I have always 
had an heretical belief that there were snakes in Ireland ; 
and it may be some such disposition to question au- 
thority that keeps me from yielding to this impulse. 
The law of demand and supply alone ought to have 
settled the question in favor of the presence of the 
scholar in our politics, there has been such a cry for 
him among us for almost a generation past. Perhaps 
the response has not been very direct, but I imagine that 
our politicians have never been quite so destitute of 
scholarship as they would sometimes make appear. 
I do not think so many of them now write a good style, 
or speak a good style, as the politicians of forty, or 
fifty, or sixty years ago; but this may be merely part 
of the impression of the general worsening of things, 
familiar after middle life to every one's experience, 
from the beginning of recorded time. If something 
not so literary is meant by scholarship, if a study of 
finance, of economics, of international affairs is in 
question, it seems to go on rather more to their own 
satisfaction than that of their critics. But without 

296 



POLITICS OF AMERICAN AUTHORS 

being always very proud of the result, and without 
professing to know the facts very profoundly, one 
may still suspect that under an outside by no means 
academic there is a process of thinking in our states- 
men which is not so loose, not so unscientific, and not 
even so unscholarly as it might be supposed. It is 
not the effect of specific training, and yet it is the effect 
of training. 1 do not find that the matters dealt with 
are anywhere in the world intrusted to experts; and 
in this sense scholarship has not been called to the aid 
of our legislation or administration; but still I should 
not like to say that none of our politicians were scholars. 
That would be offensive, and it might not be true. In 
fact, I can think of several whom I should be tempted 
to call scholars if I were not just here recalled to a sense 
of my purpose not to deal quite frankly with this in- 
quiry. 



STORAGE 

IT has been the belief of certain kindly philosophers 
that if the one half of mankind knew how the 
other half lived, the two halves might be brought to- 
gether in a family affection not now so observable 
in human relations. Probably if this knowledge 
were perfect, there would still be things to bar the 
perfect brotherhood; and yet the knowledge itself is 
so interesting, if not so salutary as it has been imag- 
ined, that one can hardly refuse to impart it if one 
has it, and can reasonably hope, in the advantage of 
the ignorant, to find one's excuse with the better in- 
formed. 



City and country are still so widely apart in every 
civilization that one can safely count upon a reciprocal 
strangeness in many every-day things. For instance, 
in the country, when people break up house-keeping, 
they sell their household goods and gods, as they did 
in cities fifty or a hundred years ago ; but now in cities 
they simply store them; and vast warehouses in all 
the principal towns have been devoted to their storage. 
The warehouses are of all types, from dusty lofts over 
stores, and ammoniacal lofts over stables, to buildings 
offering acres of space, and carefully planned for the 
purpose. They are more or less fire-proof, slow-burn- 
ing, or briskly combustible, like the dwellings they 
have devastated. But the modern tendency is to a 
type where flames do not destroy, nor moth corrupt, 

298 



STORAGE 

nor thieves break through and steal. Such a ware- 
house is a city in itself, laid out in streets and avenues, 
with the private tenements on either hand duly num- 
bered, and accessible only to the tenants or their order. 
The aisles are concreted, the doors are iron, and the 
roofs are ceiled with iron; the whole place is heated by 
steam and lighted by electricity. Behind the iron 
doors, which in the New York warehouses must num- 
ber hundreds of thousands, and throughout all our 
other cities, millions, the furniture of a myriad house- 
holds is stored — the effects of people who have gone 
to Europe, or broken up house-keeping provisionally 
or definitively, or have died, or been divorced. They 
are the dead bones of homes, or their ghosts, or their 
yet living bodies held in hypnotic trances, destined 
again in some future time to animate some house or 
flat anew. In certain cases the spell lasts for many 
years, in others for a few, and in others yet it prolongs 
itself indefinitely. 

I may mention the case of one owner whom I saw 
visiting the warehouse to take out the household stuff 
that had lain there a long fifteen years. He had been 
all that while in Europe, expecting any day to come 
home and begin life again in his own land. That 
dream had passed, and now he was taking his stuff 
out of storage and shipping it to Italy. I did not envy 
him his feelings as the parts of his long-dead past rose 
round him in formless resurrection. It was not that 
they were all broken or defaced. On the contrary, 
they were in a state of preservation far more heart- 
breaking than any decay. In well-managed storage 
warehouses the things are handled with scrupulous 
care, and they are so packed into the appointed rooms 
that if not disturbed they could suffer little harm in 
fifteen or fifty years. The places are wonderfully 
well kept, and if you will visit them, say in midwinter, 

299 



LITERATURE AND LIFE 

after the fall influx of furniture has all been hidden 
away behind the iron doors of the several cells, you shall 
find their far-branching corridors scrupulously swept 
and dusted, and shall walk up and down their concrete 
length with some such sense of secure finality as you 
would experience in pacing the aisle of your family vault. 
That is what it comes to. One may feign that these 
storage warehouses are cities, but they are really cem- 
eteries: sad columbaria on whose shelves are stowed 
exanimate things once so intimately of their owners' 
lives that it is with the sense of looking at pieces and 
bits of one's dead self that one revisits them. If one 
takes the fragments out to fit them to new circum- 
stance, one finds them not only uncomformable and 
incapable, but so volubly confidential of the associa- 
tions in which they are steeped, that one wishes to 
hurry them back to their cell and lock it upon them 
forever. One feels then that the old way was far better, 
and that if the things had been auctioned off, and 
scattered up and down, as chance willed, to serve new 
uses with people who wanted them enough to pay for 
them even a tithe of their cost, it would have been wiser. 
Failing this, a fire seems the only thing for them, and 
their removal to the cheaper custody of a combustible or 
slow-burning warehouse the best recourse. Desperate 
people, aging husbands and wives, who have attempted 
the reconstruction of their homes with these 

"Portions and parcels of the dreadful past" 

have been known to wish for an earthquake, even, 
that would involve their belongings in an indiscrimi- 
nate ruin. 

II 

In fact, each new start in life should be made with 
material new to you, if comfort is to attend the enter- 

300 



STORAGE 

prise. It is not only sorrowful but it is futile to store 
your possessions, if you hope to find the old happiness 
in taking them out and using them again. It is not 
that they will not go into place, after a fashion, and 
perform their old office, but that the pang they will 
inflict through the suggestion of the other places where 
they served their purpose in other years will be only 
the keener for the perfection with which they do it 
now. If they cannot be sold, and if no fire comes 
down from heaven to consume them, then they had 
better be stored with no thought of ever taking them 
out again. 

That will be expensive, or it will be inexpensive, 
according to the sort of storage they are put into. The 
inexperienced in such matters may be surprised, and 
if they have hearts they may be grieved, to learn 
that the fire-proof storage of the furniture of the aver- 
age house would equal the rent of a very comfortable 
domicile in a small town, or a farm by which a family's 
living can be earned, with a decent dwelling in which 
it can be sheltered. Yet the space required is not 
very great; three fair -sized rooms will hold every- 
thing; and there is sometimes a fierce satisfaction 
in seeing how closely the things that once stood largely 
about, and seemed to fill ample parlors and chambers, 
can be packed away. To be sure they are not in their 
familiar attitudes; they He on their sides or backs, 
or stand upon their heads; between the legs of library 
or dining tables are stuffed all kinds of minor movables, 
with cushions, pillows, pictures, cunningly adjusted 
to the environment; and mattresses pad the walls, or 
interpose their soft bulk between pieces of furniture 
that would otherwise rend each other. Carpets sewn 
in cotton against moths, and rugs in long rolls; the 
piano hovering under its ample frame a whole brood 
of helpless little guitars, mandolins, and banjos, and 

301 



LITERATURE AND LIFE 

supporting on its broad back a bulk of lighter cases 
to the fire-proof ceiling of the cell; paintings in boxes 
indistinguishable outwardly from their companioning 
mirrors; barrels of china and kitchen utensils, and 
all the what-not of householding and house- keeping 
contribute to the repletion. 

There is a science observed in the arrangement of 
the various effects; against the rear wall and packed 
along the floor, and then in front of and on top of these, 
is built a superstructure of the things that may be 
first wanted, in case of removal, or oftenest wanted 
in some exigency of the homeless life of the owners, 
pending removal. The lightest and slightest articles 
float loosely about the door, or are interwoven in a 
kind of fabric just within, and curtaining the pon- 
derous mass behind. The effect is not so artistic as 
the mortuary mosaics which the Roman Capuchins 
design with the bones of their dead brethren in the 
crypt of their church, but the warehousemen no doubt 
have their just pride in it, and feel an artistic pang in 
its provisional or final disturbance. 

It had better never be disturbed, for it is disturbed 
only in some futile dream of returning to the past; 
and we never can return to the past on the old terms. 
It is well in all things to accept life implicitly, and 
when an end has come to treat it as the end, and not 
vainly mock it as a suspense of function. When 
the poor break up their homes, with no immediate 
hope of founding others, they must sell their belong- 
ings because they cannot afford to pay storage on 
them. The rich or richer store their household effects, 
and cheat themselves with the illusion that they are 
going some time to rehabilitate with them just such 
a home as they have dismantled. But the illusion 
probably deceives nobody so little as those who cherish 
the vain hope. As long as they cherish it, however 

302 



STORAGE 

— and they must cherish it till their furniture or them- 
selves fall to dust — they cannot begin life anew, as 
the poor do who have kept nothing of the sort to link 
them to the past. This is one of the disabilities of 
the prosperous, who will probably not be relieved of 
it till some means of storing the owner as well as the 
furniture is invented. In the immense range of modern 
ingenuity, this is perhaps not impossible. Why not, 
while we are still in life, some sweet oblivious antidote 
which shall drug us against memory, and after time 
shall elapse for the reconstruction of a new home in 
place of the old, shall repossess us of ourselves as un- 
changed as the things with which we shall again 
array it? Here is a pretty idea for some dreamer to 
spin into the filmy fabric of a romance, and I hand- 
somely make a present of it to the first comer. If 
the dreamer is of the right quality he will know how 
to make the reader feel that with the universal long- 
ing to return to former conditions or circumstances it 
must always be a mistake to do so, and he will subtly 
insinuate the disappointment and discomfort of the 
stored personality in resuming its old relations. With 
that just mixture of the comic and pathetic which 
we desire in romance, he will teach convincingly that 
a stored personality is to be desired only if it is per- 
manently stored, with the implication of a like finality 
in the storage of its belongings. 

Save in some signal exception, a thing taken out 
of storage cannot be established in its former function 
without a sense of its comparative inadequacy. It 
stands in the old place, it serves the old use, and yet 
a new thing would be better; it would even in some 
subtle wise be more appropriate, if I may indulge so 
audacious a paradox; for the time is new, and so will 
be all the subconscious keeping in which our lives 
are mainly passed. We are supposed to have associa- 

303 



LITERATURE AND LIFE 

tions with the old things which render them precious, 
but do not the associations rather render them painful? 
If that is true of the inanimate things, how much truer 
it is of those personalities which once environed and 
furnished our lives! Take the article of old friends, 
for instance: has it ever happened to the reader to 
witness the encounter of old friends after the lapse of 
years? Such a meeting is conventionally imagined 
to be full of tender joy, a rapture that vents itself in 
manly tears, perhaps, and certainly in womanly tears. 
But really is it any such emotion? Honestly is not 
it a cruel embarrassment, which all the hypocritical 
pretences cannot hide? The old friends smile and 
laugh, and babble incoherently at one another, but 
are they genuinely glad? Is not each wishing the 
other at that end of the earth from which he came? 
Have they any use for each other such as people of 
unbroken associations have? 

I have lately been privy to the reunion of two old 
comrades who are bound together more closely than 
most men in a community of interests, occupations, 
and ideals. During a long separation they had kept 
account of each other's opinions as well as experiences ; 
they had exchanged letters, from time to time, in which 
they opened their minds fully to each other, and found 
themselves constantly in accord. When they met 
they made a great shouting, and each pretended that 
he found the other just what he used to be. They 
talked a long, long time, fighting the invisible enemy 
which they felt between them. The enemy was habit, 
the habit of other minds and hearts, the daily use of 
persons and things which in their separation they had 
not had in common. When the old friends parted 
they promised to meet every day, and now, since their 
lines had been cast in the same places again, to repair 
the ravage of the envious years, and become again 

304 



STORAGE 

to each other all that they had ever been. But though 
they live in the same town, and often dine at the same 
table, and belong to the same club, yet they have not 
grown together again. They have grown more and 
more apart, and are uneasy in each other's presence, 
tacitly self-reproachful for the same effect which neither 
of them could avert or repair. They had been re- 
spectively in storage, and each, in taking the other 
out, has experienced in him the unfitness which grows 
upon the things put away for a time and reinstated 
in a former function. 

Ill 

1 have not touched upon these facts of life, without 
the purpose of finding some way out of the coil. There 
seems none better than the counsel of keeping one's 
face set well forward, and one's eyes fixed steadfastly 
upon the future. This is the hint we will get from 
nature if we will heed her, and note how she never 
recurs, never stores or takes out of storage. Fancy 
rehabilitating one's first love : how nature would mock 
at that! We cannot go back and be the men and 
women we were, any more than we can go back and 
be children. As we grow older, each year's change 
in us is more chasmal and complete. There is no 
elixir whose magic will recover us to ourselves as we 
were last year; but perhaps we shall return to our- 
selves more and more in the times, or the eternity, 
to come. Some instinct or inspiration implies the 
promise of this, but only on condition that we shall 
not cling to the life that has been ours, and hoard its 
mummified image in our hearts. We must not seek 
to store ourselves, but must part with what we were 
for the use and behoof of others, as the poor part with 
their worldly gear when they move from one place to 

305 



LITERATURE AND LIFE 

another. It is a curious and significant property of 
our outworn characteristics that, like our old furniture, 
they' will serve admirably in the life of some other, 
and that this other can profitably make them his when 
we can no longer keep them ours, or ever hope to re- 
sume them. They not only go down to successive 
generations, but they spread beyond our lineages, 
and serve the turn of those whom we never knew to be 
within the circle of our influence. 

Civilization imparts itself by some such means, and 
the lower classes are clothed in the cast conduct of the 
upper, which if it had been stored would have left the 
inferiors rude and barbarous. We have only to think 
how socially naked most of us would be if we had not 
had the beautiful manners of our exclusive society to 
put on at each change of fashion when it dropped them. 

All earthly and material things should be worn 
out with use, and not preserved against decay by any 
unnatural artifice. Even when broken and disabled 
from overuse they have a kind of respectability which 
must commend itself to the observer, and which par- 
takes of the pensive grace of ruin. An old table with 
one leg gone, and slowly lapsing to decay in the wood- 
shed, is the emblem of a fitter order than the same 
table, with all its legs intact, stored with the rest of 
the furniture from a broken home. Spinning-wheels 
gathering dust in the garret of a house that is itself 
falling to pieces have a dignity that deserts them when 
they are dragged from their refuge, and furbished 
up with ribbons and a tuft of fresh tow, and made 
to serve the hollow occasions of bric-a-brac, as they 
were a few years ago. A pitcher broken at the foun- 
tain, or a battered kettle on a rubbish heap, is a vener- 
able object, but not crockery and copper-ware stored 
in the possibility of future need. However carefully 
handed down from one generation to another, the 

306 



STORAGE 

old objects have a forlorn incongruity in their suc- 
cessive surroundings which appeals to the compassion 
rather than the veneration of the witness. 

It was from a truth deeply mystical that Hawthorne 
declared against any sort of permanence in the dwell- 
ings of men, and held that each generation should 
newly house itself. He preferred the perishability 
of the wooden American house to the durability of 
the piles of brick or stone which in Europe affected 
him as with some moral miasm from the succession 
of sires and sons and grandsons that had died out of 
them. But even of such structures as these it is im- 
pressive how little the earth makes with the passage 
of time. Where once a great city of them stood, you 
shall find a few tottering walls, scarcely more mindful 
of the past than " the cellar and the well" which Holmes 
marked as the ultimate monuments, the last witnesses, 
to the existence of our more transitory habitations. 
It is the law of the patient sun that everything under 
it shall decay, and if by reason of some swift calamity, 
some fiery cataclysm, the perishable shall be over- 
taken by a fate that fixes it in unwasting arrest, it 
cannot be felt that the law has been set aside in the 
interest of men's happiness or cheerfulness. Neither 
Pompeii nor Herculaneum invites the gayety of the spec- 
tator, who as he walks their disinterred thoroughfares 
has the weird sense of taking a former civilization out 
of storage, and the ache of finding it wholly unadapted 
to the actual world. As far as his comfort is concerned, 
it had been far better that those cities had not been 
stored, but had fallen to the ruin that has overtaken all 
their contemporaries. 

IV 

No, good friend, sir or madam, as the case may be, 
but most likely madam: if you are about to break 

307 



LITERATURE AND LIFE 

up your household for any indefinite period, and are 
not so poor that you need sell your things, be warned 
against putting them in storage, unless of the most 
briskly combustible type. Better, far better, give 
them away, and disperse them by that means to a 
continuous use that shall end in using them up; or 
if no one will take them, then hire a vacant lot, some- 
where, and devote them to the flames. By that means 
you shall bear witness against a custom that insults 
the order of nature, and crowds the cities with the 
cemeteries of dead homes, where there is scarcely space 
for the living homes. Do not vainly fancy that you 
shall take your stuff out of storage and find it adapted 
to the ends that it served before it was put in. You 
will not be the same, or have the same needs or desires, 
when you take it out, and the new place which you 
shall hope to equip with it will receive it with cold reluc- 
tance, or openly refuse it, insisting upon forms and di- 
mensions that render it ridiculous or impossible. The 
law is that nothing taken out of storage is the same as it 
was when put in, and this law, hieroglyphed in those rude 
graffiti apparently inscribed by accident in the process 
of removal, has only such exceptions as prove the rule. 
The world to which it has returned is not the same, 
and that makes all the difference. Yet, truth and beau- 
ty do not change, however the moods and fashions 
change. The ideals remain, and these alone you can 
go back to, secure of finding them the same, to-day and 
to-morrow, that they were yesterday. This perhaps is 
because they have never been in storage, but in con- 
stant use, while the moods and fashions have been put 
away and taken out a thousand times. Most people 
have never had ideals, but only moods and fashions, 
but such people, least of all, are fitted to find in them 
that pleasure of the rococo which consoles the idealist 
when the old moods and fashions reappear. 

308 



"FLOATING DOWN THE RIVER ON THE OHIO " 

THERE was not much promise of pleasure in the 
sodden afternoon of a mid -March day at Pitts- 
burg, where the smoke of a thousand foundry chim- 
neys gave up trying to rise through the thick, soft 
air, and fell with the constant rain which it dyed its 
own black. But early memories stirred joyfully in the 
two travellers in whose consciousness I was making 
my tour, at sight of the familiar stern-wheel steam- 
boat lying beside the wharf -boat at the foot of the 
dilapidated levee, and doing its best to represent 
the hundreds of steamboats that used to lie there in 
the old days. It had the help of three others in its 
generous effort, and the levee itself made a gallant 
pretence of being crowded with freight, and succeeded 
in displaying several saturated piles of barrels and 
agricultural implements on the irregular pavement 
whose wheel- worn stones, in long. stretches, were sunk- 
en out of sight in their parent mud. The boats and 
the levee were jointly quite equal to the demand made 
upon them by the light-hearted youngsters of sixty- 
five and seventy, who were setting out on their journey 
in fulfilment of a long-cherished dream, and for whom 
much less freight and much fewer boats would have re- 
habilitated the past. 



When they mounted the broad stairway, tidily 
strewn with straw to save it from the mud of careless 

309 



LITERATURE AND LIFE 

boots, and entered the long saloon of the steamboat, 
the promise of their fancy was more than made good 
for them. From the clerk's office, where they eagerly 
paid their fare, the saloon stretched two hundred feet 
by thirty away to the stern, a cavernous splendor of 
white paint and gilding, starred with electric bulbs, 
and fenced at the stern with wide windows of painted 
glass. Midway between the great stove in the bow 
where the men were herded, and the great stove at the 
stern where the women kept themselves in the seclu- 
sion which the tradition of Western river travel still 
guards, after wellnigh a hundred years, they were 
given ample state-rooms, whose appointments so ex- 
actly duplicated those they remembered from far-off 
days that they could have believed themselves awak- 
ened from a dream of insubstantial time, with the 
events in which it had seemed to lapse, mere feints of 
experience. When they sat down at the supper-table 
and were served with the sort of belated steamboat 
dinner which it recalled as vividly, the kind, sooty 
faces and snowy aprons of those who served them 
were so quite those of other days that they decided 
all repasts since were mere Barmecide feasts, and 
made up for the long fraud practised upon them with 
the appetites of the year 1850. 



II 

A rigider sincerity than shall be practised here might 
own that the table of the good steamboat Avonek left 
something to be desired, if tested by more sophisti- 
cated cuisines, but in the article of corn-bread it was 
of an inapproachable pre-eminence. This bread was 
made of the white corn which North knows not, nor 
the hapless East; and the buckwheat cakes at break- 

310 



"FLOATING DOWN THE RIVER ON THE O-HI-0 " 

fast were without blame, and there was a simple va- 
riety in the abundance which ought to have satisfied 
if it did not flatter the choice. The only thing that 
seemed strangely, that seemed sadly, anomalous in 
a land flowing with ham and bacon was that the Avo- 
nek had not imagined providing either for the guests, 
no one of whom could have had a religious scruple 
against them. 

The thing, indeed, which was first and last con- 
spicuous in the passengers, was their perfectly Amer- 
ican race and character. At the start, when with an 
acceptable observance of Western steamboat tradition 
the Avonek left her wharf eight hours behind her ap- 
pointed time, there were very few passengers; but 
they began to come aboard at the little towns of both 
shores as she swam southward and westward, till all 
the tables were so full that, in observance of another 
Western steamboat tradition, one did well to stand 
guard over his chair lest some other who liked it should 
seize it earlier. The passengers were of every age 
and condition, except perhaps the highest condition, 
and they seemed none the worse for being more like 
Americans of the middle of the last century than of 
the beginning of this. Their fashions were of an ap- 
proximation to those of the present, but did not scru- 
pulously study detail; their manners were those of 
simpler if not sincerer days. 

The women kept to themselves at their end of the 
saloon, aloof from the study of any but their husbands 
or kindred, but the men were everywhere else about, 
and open to observation. They were not so open to 
conversation, for your mid- Westerner is not a facile, 
though not an unwilling, talker. They sat by their 
tall, cast-iron stove (of the oval pattern unvaried since 
the earliest stove of the region), and silently rumi- 
nated their tobacco and spat into the clustering cus- 

311 



LITERATURE AND LIFE 

pidors at their feet. They would always answer civ- 
illy if questioned, and oftenest intelligently, but they 
asked nothing in return, and they seemed to have 
none of that curiosity once known or imagined in them 
by Dickens and other averse aliens. They had most- 
ly faces of resolute power, and such a looking of know- 
ing exactly what they wanted as would not have prom- 
ised well for any collectively or individually opposing 
them. If ever the sense of human equality has ex- 
pressed itself in the human countenance it speaks un- 
mistakably from American faces like theirs. 

They were neither handsome nor unhandsome; but 
for a few striking exceptions, they had been impar- 
tially treated by nature; and where they were nota- 
bly plain their look of force made up for their lack 
of beauty. They were notably handsomest in a tall 
young fellow of a lean face, absolute Greek in pro- 
file, amply thwarted with a branching mustache, and 
slender of figure, on whom his clothes, lustrous from 
much sitting down and leaning up, grew like the bark 
on a tree, and who moved slowly and gently about, 
and spoke with a low, kind voice. In his young come- 
liness he was like a god, as the gods were fancied in 
the elder world : a chewing and a spitting god, indeed, 
but divine in his passionless calm. 

He was a serious divinity, and so were all the mid- 
Western human -beings about him. One heard no 
joking either of the dapper or cockney sort of cities, or 
the quaint graphic phrasing of Eastern country folk ; 
and it may have been not far enough West for the true 
Western humor. At any rate, when they were not 
silent these men still were serious. 

The women were apparently serious, too, and where 
they were associated with the men were, if they were 
not really subject, strictly abeyant, in the spectator's 
eye. The average of them was certainly not above 

312 



"FLOATING DOWN THE RIVER ON THE OHIO " 

the American woman's average in good looks, though 
one 3 7 oung mother of six children, well grown save 
for the baby in her arms, was of the type some mas- 
ters loved to paint, with eyes set wide under low-arched 
brows. She had the placid dignity and the air of 
motherly goodness which goes fitly with such beauty, 
and the sight of her was such as to disperse many of 
the misgivings that beset the beholder who looketh 
upon the woman when she is New. As she seemed, 
so any man might wish to remember his mother seem- 
ing. 

All these river folk, who came from the farms and 
villages along the stream, and never from the great 
towns or cities, were well mannered, if quiet manners 
are good; and though the men nearly all chewed to- 
bacco and spat between meals, at the table they were 
of an exemplary behavior. The use of the fork ap- 
peared strange to them, and they handled it strenu- 
ously rather than agilely, yet they never used their 
knives .shovelwise, however they planted their forks 
like daggers in the steak: the steak deserved no gen- 
tler usage, indeed. They were usually young, and 
they were constantly changing, bent upon short jour- 
neys between the shore villages; they were mostly 
farm youth, apparently, though some were said to be 
going to find work at the great potteries up the river 
for wages fabulous to home-keeping experience. 

One personality which greatly took the liking of 
one of our tourists was a Kentucky mountaineer who, 
after three years' exile in a West Virginia oil town, 
was gladly returning to the home for which he and all 
his brood — of large and little comely, red-haired boys 
and girls — had never ceased to pine. His eagerness 
to get back was more than touching; it was awing; 
for it was founded on a sort of mediaeval patriotism 
that could own no excellence beyond the borders of 

313 



LITERATURE AND LIFE 

the natal region. He had prospered at high wages 
in his trade at that oil town, and his wife and children 
had managed a hired farm so well as to pay all the 
family expenses from it, but he was gladly leaving 
opportunity behind, that he might return to a land 
where, if you were passing a house at meal-time, they 
came out and made you come in and eat. "When 
you eat where I've been living you pay fifty cents/' 
he explained. "And are you taking all your house- 
hold stuff with you?" "Only the cook-stove. Well, 
I'll tell you : we made the Other things ourselves; made 
them out of plank, and they were not worth moving." 
Here was the backwoods surviving into the day of 
Trusts; and yet we talk of a world drifted hopelessly 
far from the old ideals! 



Ill 

The new ideals, the ideals of a pitiless industrial- 
ism, were sufficiently expressed along the busy shores, 
where the innumerable derricks of oil-wells silhouetted 
their gibbet shapes against the horizon, and the myr- 
iad chimneys of the foundries sent up the smoke of 
their torment into the quiet skies and flamed upon the 
forehead of the evening like baleful suns. But why 
should I be so violent of phrase against these guilt- 
less means of millionairing ? There must be iron and 
coal as well as wheat and corn in the world, and with- 
out their combination we cannot have bread. If the 
combination is in the form of a trust, such as has laid 
its giant clutch upon all those warring industries be- 
side the Ohio and swept them into one great monop- 
oly, why, it has still to show that it is worse than com- 
petition; that it is not, indeed, merely the first blind 
stirrings of the universal co-operation of which the 

314 



"FLOATING DOWN THE RIVER ON THE O-HI-O " 

dreamers of ideal commonwealths have always had 
the vision. 

The derricks and the chimneys, when one saw them, 
seemed to have all the land to themselves ; but this was 
an appearance only, terrifying in its strenuousness, 
but not, after all, the prevalent aspect. That was rather 
of farms, farms, and evermore farms, lying along the 
rich levels of the stream, and climbing as far up its 
beautiful hills as the plough could drive. In the spring 
and in the fall, when it is suddenly swollen by the ear- 
lier and the later rains, the river scales its banks and 
swims over those levels to the feet of those hills, and 
when it recedes it leaves the cornfields enriched for 
the crop that has never failed since the forests were 
first cut from the land. Other fertilizing the fields 
have never had any, but they teem as if the guano 
islands had been emptied into their laps. They feel 
themselves so rich that they part with great lengths 
and breadths of their soil to the river, which is not 
good for the river, and is not well for the fields ; so 
that the farmers, whose ease learns slowly, are be- 
ginning more and more to fence their borders with the 
young willows which form a hedge in the shallow wash 
such a great part of the way up and down the Ohio. 
Elms and maples wade in among the willows, and in 
time the river will be denied the indigestion which it 
confesses in shoals and bars at low water, and in a 
difficulty of channel at all stages. 

Meanwhile the fields flourish in spite of their unwise 
largesse to the stream, whose shores the comfortable 
farmsteads keep so constantly that they are never out 
of sight. Most commonly they are of brick, but some- 
times of painted wood, and they are set on little emi- 
nences high enough to save them from the freshets, 
but always so near the river that they cannot fail of 
its passing life. Usually a group of planted ever- 

315 



LITERATURE AND LIFE 

greens half hides the house from the boat, but its in- 
mates will not lose any detail of the show, and come 
down to the gate of the paling fence to watch the Avo- 
nek float by: motionless men and women, who lean 
upon the supporting barrier, and rapt children who 
hold by their skirts and hands. There is not the eager 
New England neatness about these homes; now and 
then they have rather a sloven air, which does not 
discord with their air of comfort ; and very, very rare- 
ly they stagger drunkenly in a ruinous neglect. Ex- 
cept where a log cabin has hardily survived the pio- 
neer period, the houses are nearly all of one pattern; 
their facades front the river, and low chimneys point 
either gable, where a half-story forms the attic of the 
two stories below. Gardens of pot-herbs flank them, 
and behind cluster the corn-cribs, and the barns and 
stables stretch into the fields that stretch out to the 
hills, now scantily wooded, but ever lovely in the lines 
that change with the steamer's course. 

Except in the immediate suburbs of the large towns, 
there is no ambition beyond that of rustic comfort in 
the buildings on the shore. There is no such thing, 
apparently, as a summer cottage, with its mock hu- 
mility of name, up or down the whole tortuous length 
of the Ohio. As yet the land is not openly depraved 
by shows of wealth; those who amass it either keep 
it to themselves or come away to spend it in Euro- 
pean travel, or pause to waste it unrecognized on the 
ungrateful Atlantic seaboard. The only distinctions 
that are marked are between the homes of honest in- 
dustry above the banks and the homes below them of 
the leisure, which it is hoped is not dishonest. But, 
honest or dishonest, it is there apparently to stay in 
the house-boats which line the shores by thousands, 
and repeat on Occidental terms in our new land the 
river-life of old and far Cathay. 

316 



"FLOATING DOWN THE RIVER ON THE O-HI-0 " 

They formed the only feature of their travel which 
our tourists found absolutely novel ; they could clearly 
or dimly recall from the past every other feature but 
the house-boats, which they instantly and gladly nat- 
uralized to their memories of it. The houses had in 
common the form of a freight-car set in a flat-bottomed 
boat ; the car would be shorter or longer, with one, or 
two, or three windows in its sides, and a section of 
stovepipe softly smoking from its roof. The windows 
might be curtained or they might be bare, but appar- 
ently there was no other distinction among the house- 
boat dwellers, whose sluggish craft lay moored among 
the willows, or tied to an elm or a maple, or even made 
fast to a stake on shore. There were cases in which 
they had not followed the fall of the river promptly 
enough, and lay slanted on the beach, or propped up 
to a more habitable level on its slope ; in a sole, sad in- 
stance, the house had gone down with the boat and 
lay wallowing in the wash of the flood. But they all 
gave evidence of a tranquil and unhurried life which 
the soul of the beholder envied within him, whether 
it manifested itself in the lord of the house-boat fish- 
ing from its bow, or the lady coming to cleanse some 
household utensil at its stern. Infrequently a group 
of the house-boat dwellers seemed to be drawing a net, 
and in one high event they exhibited a good-sized fish 
of their capture, but nothing so strenuous character- 
ized their attitude on any other occasion. The accept- 
ed theory of them was that they did by day as nearly 
nothing as men could do and live, and that by night 
their forays on the bordering farms supplied the sim- 
ple needs of people who desired neither to toil nor to 
spin, but only to emulate Solomon in his glory with 
the least possible exertion. The joyful witness of their 
ease would willingly have sacrificed to them any 
amount of the facile industrial or agricultural pros- 

317 



LITERATURE AND LIFE 

perity about them and left them slumberously afloat, 
unmolested by dreams of landlord or tax-gatherer. 
Their existence for the fleeting time seemed the true 
interpretation of the sage's philosophy, the fulfilment 
of the poet's aspiration. 

" Why should we only toil, that are the roof and crown of 
things?" 

How did they pass their illimitable leisure, when 
they rested from the fishing-net by day and the chicken- 
coop by night? Did they read the new historical fic- 
tions aloud to one another? Did some of them even 
meditate the thankless muse and not mind her ingrat- 
itude? Perhaps the ladies of the house-boats, when they 
found themselves — as they often did — in companies of 
four or five, had each other in to " evenings/' at which 
one of them read a paper on some artistic or literary 
topic. 

IV 

The trader's boat, of an elder and more authentic 
tradition, sometimes shouldered the house-boats away 
from a village landing, but it, too, was a peaceful home, 
where the family life visibly went hand-in-hand with 
commerce. When the trader has supplied all the wants 
and wishes of a neighborhood, he unmoors his craft 
and drops down the river's tide to where it meets the 
ocean's tide in the farthermost Mississippi, and there 
either sells out both his boat and his stock, or hitches 
his home to some returning steamboat, and climbs 
slowly, with many pauses, back to the upper Ohio. 
But his home is not so interesting as that of the house- 
boatman, nor so picturesque as that of the raftsman, 
whose floor of logs rocks flexibly under his shanty, 
but securely rides the current. As the pilots said, a 

318 



u FLOATING DOWN THE RIVER ON THE O-HI-0 " 

steamboat never tries to hurt a raft of logs, which is 
adapted to dangerous retaliation; and by night it al- 
ways gives a wide berth to the lantern tilting above 
the raft from a swaying pole. By day the raft forms 
one of the pleasantest aspects of the river-life, with its 
convoy of skiffs always searching the stream or shore 
for logs which have broken from it, and which the 
skiffmen recognize by distinctive brands or stamps. 
Here and there the logs lie in long ranks upon the 
shelving beaches, mixed with the drift of trees and 
fence -rails, and frames of corn -cribs and hen-coops, 
and even house walls, which the freshets have brought 
down and left stranded. The tops of the little willows 
are tufted gayly with hay and rags, and other spoil of 
the flood; and in one place a disordered mattress was 
lodged high among the boughs of a water-maple, where 
it would form building material for countless genera- 
tions of birds. The fat cornfields were often littered 
with a varied wreckage which the farmers must soon 
heap together and burn, to be rid of it, and everywhere 
were proofs of the river's power to devastate as well as 
enrich its shores. The dwellers there had no power 
against it, in its moments of insensate rage, and the 
land no protection from its encroachments except in 
the simple device of the willow hedges, which, if plant- 
ed, sometimes refused to grow, but often came of them- 
selves and kept the torrent from the loose, unfathom- 
able soil of the banks, otherwise crumbling helplessly 
into it. 

The rafts were very well, and the house-boats and 
the traders' boats, but the most majestic feature of the 
river-life was the tow of coal-barges which, going or 
coming, the Avonek met every few miles. Whether 
going or coming they were pushed, not pulled, by the 
powerful steamer which gathered them in tens and 
twenties before her, and rode the mid -current with 

319 



LITERATURE AND LIFE 

them, when they were full, or kept the slower watel 
near shore when they were empty. They claimed 
the river where they passed, and the Avonek bowed to 
an unwritten law in giving them the full right of way, 
from the time when their low bulk first rose in sight, 
with the chimneys of their steamer towering above 
them and her gay contours gradually making them- 
selves seen, till she receded from the encounter, with 
the wheel at her stern pouring a cataract of yellow 
water from its blades. It was insurpassably pict- 
uresque always, and not the tapering masts or the 
swelling sails of any sea-going craft could match it. 



So at least the travellers thought who were here re- 
visiting the earliest scenes of childhood, and who per- 
haps found them unduly endeared. They perused 
them mostly from an easy seat at the bow of the hur- 
ricane-deck, and, whenever the weather favored them, 
spent the idle time in selecting shelters for their de- 
clining years among the farmsteads that offered them- 
selves to their choice up and down the shores. The 
weather commonly favored them, and there was at 
least one whole day on the lower river when the weather 
was divinely flattering. The soft, dull air lulled their 
nerves while it buffeted their faces, and the sun, that 
looked through veils of mist and smoke, gently warmed 
their aging frames and found itself again in their 
hearts. Perhaps it was there that the water-elms and 
water-maples chiefly budded, and the red-birds sang, 
and the drifting flocks of blackbirds called and clat- 
tered; but surely these also spread their gray and 
pink against the sky and filled it with their voices. 
There were meadow-larks and robins without as well 

320 



"FLOATING DOWN THE RIVER ON THE OHIO " 

as within, and it was no subjective plough that turned 
the earliest furrows in those opulent fields. 

When they were tired of sitting there, they climbed, 
invited or uninvited, but always welcomed, to the pilot- 
house, where either pilot of the two who were always 
on watch poured out in an unstinted stream the lore of 
the river on which all their days had been passed. They 
knew from indelible association every ever-changing 
line of the constant hills; every dwelling by the low 
banks ; every aspect of the smoky towns ; every caprice 
of the river; every tree, every stump; probably every 
bud and bird in the sky. They talked only of the 
river ; they cared for nothing else. The Cuban cumber 
and the Philippine folly were equally far from them; 
the German prince was not only as if he had never been 
here, but as if he never had been; no public question 
concerned them but that of abandoning the canals 
which the Ohio legislature was then foolishly de- 
bating. Were not the canals water-ways, too, like 
the river, and if the State unnaturally abandoned 
them would not it be for the behoof of those railroads 
which the rivermen had always fought, and which 
would have made a solitude of the river if they 
could? 

But they could not, and there was nothing more 
surprising and delightful in this blissful voyage than 
the evident fact that the old river traffic had strongly 
survived, and seemed to be more strongly reviving. 
Perhaps it was not; perhaps the fondness of those 
Ohio-river-born passengers was abused by an illusion 
(as subjective as that of the buds and birds) of a vivid 
variety of business and pleasure on the beloved stream. 
But again, perhaps not. They were seldom out of 
sight of the substantial proofs of both in the through 
or way packets they encountered, or the nondescript 
steam craft that swarmed about the mouths of the con- 

321 



LITERATURE AND LIFE 

tributory rivers, and climbed their shallowing courses 
into the recesses of their remotest hills, to the last lurk- 
ing-places of their oil and coal. 



VI 

The Avonek was always stopping to put off or take 
on merchandise or men. She would stop for a single 
passenger, planted in the mud with his telescope valise 
or gripsack under the edge of a lonely cornfield, or to 
gather upon her decks the few or many casks or bales 
that a farmer wished to ship. She lay long hours by 
the wharf-boats of busy towns, exchanging one cargo 
for another, in that anarchic fetching and carrying 
which we call commerce, and which we drolly suppose 
to be governed by laws. But wherever she paused or 
parted, she tested the pilot's marvellous skill, for no 
landing, no matter how often she landed in the same 
place, could be twice the same. At each return the 
varying stream and shore must be studied, and every 
caprice of either divined. It was always a triumph, 
a miracle, whether by day or by night, a constant 
wonder how under the pilot's inspired touch she glided 
softly to her moorings, and without a jar slipped from 
them again and went on her course. 

But the landings by night were of course the finest. 
Then the wide fan of the search-light was unfurled 
upon the point to be attained and the heavy staging 
lowered from the bow to the brink, perhaps crushing 
the willow hedges in its fall, and scarcely touching 
the land before a black, ragged deck-hand had run out 
through the splendor and made a line fast to the trunk 
of the nearest tree. Then the work of lading or unlad- 
ing rapidly began in the witching play of the light, 
that set into radiant relief the black, eager faces and 

322 



"FLOATING DOWN THE RIVER ON THE OHIO" 

the black, eager figures of the deck-hands struggling 
up or down the staging under boxes of heavy wares, 
or kegs of nails, or bales of straw, or blocks of stone, 
steadily mocked or cursed at in their shapeless effort, 
till the last of them reeled back to the deck down the 
steep of the lifting stage, and dropped to his broken 
sleep wherever he could coil himself, doglike, down 
among the heaps of freight. 

No dog, indeed, leads such a hapless life as theirs; 
and ah! and ah! why should their sable shadows in- 
trude in a picture that was meant to be all so gay and 
glad? But ah! and ah! where, in what business of 
this hard world, is not prosperity built upon the strug- 
gle of toiling men, who still endeavor their poor best, 
and writhe and writhe under the burden of their broth- 
ers above, till they lie still under the lighter load of their 
mother earth? 



THE END 



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